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JANE— 

OUR STRANGER 


NOVELS BY MARY BORDEN 


THE ROMANTIC WOMAN 
THE TORTOISE 
JANE—OUR STRANGER 


J ANE- 

OUR STRANGER 


A NOVEL 


BY 

MARY BORDEN 



NEW YORK 

ALFRED • A - KNOPF 
1923 

0 ^ 


COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. 


/ 


Published , September, 1923 



PUBLISHED IN LONDON, 1923, 
BY WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD. 



Set up, electrotyped, and printed by the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N. Y. 
Paper supplied by W. F. Etherington & Co., New Yorlc. 

Bound by H. Wolff Estate, New York. 


MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

SEP 13 1923 

' ©C1A7G0106^ 

--VX& V 










PART I 





I 


I T is a pity we do not die when our lives are finished. 
Jane may live another twenty years—a long time to wait, 
alone between two worlds. Jane is forty-three, I am 
five years older, Philibert is fifty-six, my mother nearly 
eighty, we are all alive, and strangely enough Maman is 
the only one whose life is not yet ended. Hers will not end 
till the moment of her death. She has been a wise artist. 
She is still embroidering delicately the pattern of her days; 
she still holds the many threads in her fingers. Quietly, 
exquisitely she will put in the last stitches. They will be the 
most beautiful of all; they will be her signature, the signa¬ 
ture of a lady. Then she will close her eyes and commend 
her soul to God and the perfect work of her worldly wisdom 
will be finished. 

As for me, I see no reason why I should not live on in¬ 
definitely just as I have done, and on the whole I am more 
comfortable here than in Purgatory, a place that I imagine 
to be like the suburbs of London. I see myself there, 
tapping with my crutch, along endless tramway lines be¬ 
tween interminable rows of dingy perky villas. This little 
street in the Faubourg Saint Germain is much nicer. It is 
old and proud and secretive; a good street for a cripple to 
live in; it shelters and protects him. Once he has entered 
it he has no distance to go to get home. It is usually de¬ 
serted and the great pale houses show discreet shuttered 
windows with no one behind the shutters to stare at him. 
I am Philibert’s crippled brother. Something went wrong 
with me before I was born. Nothing else of importance 
has ever happened to me, except Jane’s marrying my brother. 

3 


4 


Jane—Our Stranger 

Jane loved this little street. She said that it told her the 
story of France and conveyed to her all the charm of 
the Paris she loved best, the proud gentle mysterious Paris 
of the 18th century that with all its fine reserved grandeur 
assumes modestly the look of a small provincial town. 

I came to live here when Philibert sold our house in the 
Rue de Varenne that is just round the corner, and my 
mother went to her new apartment near the fitoile. That 
was twenty years ago, and very little has changed in the 
street since I came to these rooms at the bottom of this little 
courtyard between Constantine’s big white house and the 
Embassy. The little man who peddled bird-seed has van¬ 
ished long ago, his voice is no more to be heard chanting, 
but other street vendors still come by with their sing-song 
calls. What indeed was there that could change, save per¬ 
haps old Madame Barbier’s grocery shop at the corner, 
tucked up against Constantine’s stable wall? But even 
Madame Barbier has remained the same. Her hair is as 
smooth and glossy black, her tight corsage as neat, and her 
trim window with its glass jars of honey and the nice bright 
boxes of groceries is as it always has been. A thrifty re¬ 
spectable woman is Madame Barbier, with a pleasant word 
for her neighbours. For the rest, on the opposite side of 
the street there is the convent, with its pointed roof and the 
chapel belfry showing above the wall, and there are the five 
big houses with their great gates that make up the whole 
length of the street. Not a long street—often when I turn 
into it at one end, I recognize a familiar figure going out 
of it at the other, the good Abbe perhaps going home after 
confessing the sisters in the convent, or old Madame 
d’Avrecourt in her shabby black jacket, her fine little 
withered face under her bonnet, wearing its habitual enig¬ 
matic smile. Monsieur l’Abbe says that her voluminous 
petticoats are heavy with the sacred charms she has sewn 
into the hems, and that may well be; I know that her devo¬ 
tion is very great and her interest in the outside world very 
small, and the sight of her is comforting to me. 


Jane—Our Stranger 5 

It is so quiet here, and so confined. It is like a cloister 
—or a prison—I am glad of that. 

Tonight, Good Friday night, I can hear the good sisters 
in the chapel singing. The mysticism of their haunting 
chant penetrates the walls of this old house, and tonight 
because of their lamenting, because of their dread disciplined 
agony of supplication, the street is immensely deep and high, 
whereas yesterday it was just small and dim and worldly, 
with its houses blinking over its walls, a proud battered de¬ 
ceiving old street, hiding the rare beauty of its dwellings, 
guarding the secrets of its families behind mute 
shutters, till the day it should crumble to pieces or an inso¬ 
lent government should turn it upside down like an ash- 
bin. 

It never, of course, could get used to Jane. Who of us 
did get used to Jane? Did I myself? Wasn’t she a big 
troubling problem to us all till the very end? How could 
we not be afraid of her? Poor magnificent Jane—fine 
timid innocent child—dangerous nature woman—dreadful 
crying message from a new bellowing land—what was she? 
What was she not? How could she fit in here? She was 
as strange here as a leopard beautifully moving down the 
grey narrow pavement. How she used to frighten the good 
Abbe. I have seen him scuttle into a neighbouring doorway 
to let her pass, as if there were no room for him along the 
stones she walked so grandly. It was true. There was no 
room for any one but Jane when she came, and now that she 
is gone never to come back again, the place is as dreary and 
empty as an abandoned cemetery and the light is as insip¬ 
idly pale as the half shadow in a sick room. She has left 
a sickness in this place, because she came here sometimes 
to see me—and won’t come any more. 

And yet I stay on here. I shall stay here always. I have 
no reason to go anywhere now that I have been to America 
to see Jane, and have come back with the accurate awful 
knowledge of the great distance between us. Ah, that wide 
sea, that New York, a high cold gate into a strange over- 


6 Jane—Our Stranger 

powering country, those immense prairies, and those tiny 
farm houses, with tiny women watching the train; Jane, a 
tiny woman, Jane a speck, in a town that is a dot on the 
map. I will write down Jane’s story. I will remember it 
all, everything that she told me and everything that I saw, 
and will put it all down exactly with perfect precision and 
accuracy, and then, perhaps I shall understand her. Poor 
Jane—she wanted to understand life. She believed always 
that there was a reason for things, an ultimate reason and a 
purpose. She was no philosopher, she was a woman of 
faith. She should have been the wife of a pioneer, the wife 
of such a man as Isak, who went into the wilderness with a 
sack over his shoulder. Jane was made for such a man. I 
can see them together going out under the sky, he, grave, 
deep-chested, long-limbed, “a barge of a man,” and beside 
him a woman like a ship, moving proudly. And she married 
Philibert. Could any one who has ever seen her with Phili¬ 
bert miss the meaning of their extraordinary contrast? 
Philibert with his clever jaunty little body, his exaggerated 
elegance, his cold blue eyes and his impudent charm. She 
made him look like a toy man. She could have broken him 
in two with her hands. Why didn’t she ? It is a long story. 
People say that American women are very adaptable, very 
imitative. Jane wasn’t. She never became the least like us, 
except in looks and that meant nothing. Paquin and 
Cheruit and Philibert did that for her almost at once, but 
her looks, even without their aid, were always a disguise, 
never a revelation of her self. Some women are all of a 
piece with their charming exteriors, Jane was a child cased 
in armour. As she grew older she learned to use it, she made 
it answer, but she used it to become something she was not. 
I call up her image as I write. I evoke Jane as she was that 
last year in Paris, the most elegant woman in Europe, the 
most stared at, and the most indifferent. I remember the 
cold hard nonchalance that so frightened people she did not 
like, and the brilliant metallic grace that rippled over her 
like gleaming light when she was pleased. I remember her 


Jane—Our Stranger 7 

excessive hauteur in public, the disdainful carriage of her 
strange head that was like a coin fashioned by some morose 
craftsman of Benvenuto Cellini’s time. I recall the sidelong 
glitter of her little green eyes. I remember her in public 
places, towering above other women like an idol, mute, 
glittering, enigmatic, her curious profile with its protruding 
lower lip, the tight close bands of jewels round her forehead. 
What a figure of splendour she was in those days, when 
Philibert had done breaking her heart; and when at the age 
of forty she had ceased to cafe and had reached the perfec¬ 
tion of her physical type. 

I think of her as she was when her mother brought her to 
Paris and married her to Philibert; a great strapping girl 
with a beautiful body and an ugly sullen face that deceived 
us all. How could one see behind it? Can one blame them? 
I alone caught a glimpse. And she developed slowly in our 
artificial soil. It took twenty years for her to become a 
woman of the world, une grande dame. That was what 
they made of her. I say they, but I suppose I mean 
primarily Philibert. It is horrible to think of how much 
Philibert had to do with making her what she finally 
was. And Bianca had a hand in it too. That is even 
worse. 

We had realized the moment of Jane’s apotheosis. We 
had seen her beautifully and gravely spread her wings. We 
held our breath, waited entranced, and then, just then, she 
disappeared. Suddenly we lost her. 

I refer, now, to our group, the little Bohemian group of 
kindred spirits who loved Jane; Ludovic, Felix, Clementine 
and the others. Extraordinary that these friends of mine 
should have been the ones to love Jane best. They were a 
gay lot of sinners, quite impossible judged by any stand¬ 
ard but their own. My mother only knew of their exist¬ 
ence, through Clementine. She has always been in 
the habit of discussing artists and writers as if they 
were dead. It was distressing to her that Clementine who 
was related to her by blood and had married a Bourbon, 


8 Jane—Our Stranger 

should have held herself and her name so cheap as to consort 
with men and women of obscure origin and problematical 
genius. As for me, a man could do as he liked within 
measure, if he did not forget to keep up appearances. She 
regarded my friendship for my wonderful Ludovic and all 
the rest of them as a substitute for the more usual 
and less troublesome clandestine affairs of the ordinary 
bachelor. As I could never “faire la noce” like other men 
I was allowed these dissipations of the mind, but maman 
never forgave me for introducing Ludovic to Jane. Dearest 
mother—it was no use telling her that Ludovic was the 
greatest scholar of his day. I didn’t try to explain. After 
all Ludovic needed no championing from me. I had wanted 
to do something for Jane; I had wanted to relieve in some 
way the awful pressure of her big bleak dazzling situation. 
Hemmed in by the complications of my relationship to her, 
how many times had I not groaned over the fact that she 
had been married by that awful mother of hers to the head 
of our house and not to some one else’s devilish elder 
brother, instead of to mine, I had pondered and tormented 
myself over a way of helping her that would not give Phili¬ 
bert the chance of coming down on me and shutting the big 
strong door of his house in my face, and at length my 
opportunity had come. It had seemed to me that for her at 
last the battle was over, and that she had achieved the deso¬ 
late freedom which we could turn into enjoyment. Fan 
Ivanoff was dead. Bianca had disappeared. As for Phili¬ 
bert, he had grown tired of bothering her. Her sufferings 
no longer amused him. Her loneliness was complete. Al¬ 
though still to my eyes a figure of drama while we were 
essentially merry prosy people, she appeared to me to have 
acquired that spiritual mastery of events which made her one 
of us. I had reckoned without her child, Genevieve. 

How could I have understood then the fear with which 
she contemplated her daughter’s future? And even sup¬ 
posing that I had understood everything, and had the gift 


Jane—Our Stranger 9 

of seeing into that future and had beheld the shadow of 
that lovely monster Bianca swooping down on Jane again 
to drive her to extremity, even supposing I had known 
what was going to happen and how that would take her 
away from us forever, I still could have done nothing more 
than I did do. It had seemed to me that we could pro¬ 
vide her with a refuge, and so we did for a time. If 
Paris were to offer her any reward, any consolation, any 
comfort, then such a reward and such comfort was, I felt 
sure, to be found in the sympathy of these people who had 
gravitated to one another, out of the heavy mass of humanity 
that populated the earth, like sparks flying upwards to meet 
above the smoke and heat of the crowd in a clear lighted 
space of mental freedom. I gave her the best I had; I gave 
her my friends; and if they thought she had come to them 
to stay, well then so did I. Our mistake lay in thinking 
that because we were sufficient to each other we must be 
sufficient to Jane as well. I do not believe it occurred to 
any one of us how little we really counted for her; I, at least 
never knew it until the other day. Actually I had never 
realized that her soul was always craving something more, 
something like a heavenly certitude or a divine revelation. 

Conceited? I suppose we were; but then you see the 
world did knock at our door for admittance. We had all 
literary and artistic Europe to choose from, and we did re¬ 
alize the things we talked of. I mean that we translated our 
thoughts into things people could see, ballets, pictures, bits 
of music. We worked out our ideas for the mob to gape 
at, and our success could be measured by the bitter hostility 
of such people as Philibert, who fancied himself as a patron 
of the arts—a kind of Francois I—and found us difficult to 
patronize. 

Jane realized our worth of course. She had a touching 
reverence for our ability. She saw clearly the distinct 
worlds represented by my mother, and Ludovic; the one ex¬ 
quisite and sterile, beautifully still as a sealed room with 


io Jane—Our Stranger 

panelled walls inhabited by wax figures; the other disordered 
and merry, convulsed by riotous fancies, where daring people 
indulged their caprices, scoffed at facts and respected in¬ 
tellect. 

What Jane did not realize was the humanity underlying 
this life of ours. She thought us uncanny, but she could 
have trusted us in her trouble. And we on our side did not 
know that we did not satisfy her. After all, for the rest of 
us our deep feeling of well-being in one another’s company 
was like a divine assurance, an absolute ultimate promise. 
It was all the heavenly revelation we needed. When we 
gathered round Clementine’s dinner-table with the long 
windows opening out of the high shabby room into the 
shadowy garden where we could hear during the momentary 
hush of our voices the note of its flutey tinkling fountain, 
or when we settled deep in those large worn friendly chairs 
before Ludovic’s fire on a winter’s night, in the cosy gloom 
of his overcharged bookshelves, it would come to us over 
and over again, like the repeated sense of a divine convic¬ 
tion, that this exquisite essence of human intercourse was 
nothing less than what we had been born for. 

Jane could never have had that feeling, but we thought 
she shared it with us. We did not know about that deep 
relentless urge in Jane that was as inevitable as the rising 
tide. We never took seriously enough her fear of God. 

And so when she went away they thought—Ludovic and 
Clementine and the rest of them—“She will be here to¬ 
morrow, she will come back just as she was, and she will 
find us just where she left us.” And they continued to talk 
about her as if she had left them but an hour before to go 
and show herself as she was often obliged to do in some 
great bright hideous salon. Her chair was always there by 
Ludovic’s fireside, and they took account in their discussions 
of her probable point of view, as if she’d been there with 
them. There was something touching in their expectancy. 
There was that in their manner to remind one of the simple 
fidelity of peasants who lay the place of the absent one every 


II 


Jane—Our Stranger 

night at table. The truth did not occur to them, and I who 
wanted to be deceived let their confidence communicate it¬ 
self to me. I told myself that they were right, that she was 
bound to come back, that they had formed in her the habit 
of living humourously as they did, that they had given her 
a taste for things she would not find elsewhere, and that she 
would never be content to live now in that big blank new 
continent across the Atlantic. The word Atlantic made me 
shiver. I must have had a premonition; I must have known 
that I was going to cross it, urged out upon that cold tur¬ 
bulent waste of horrid water by a forlorn hope and an 
anguished desire to see her once more. 

I hugged to myself during those days of suspense my 
feeling of the irresistible appeal of my city. Had Jane not 
told me, one day on returning from Como, that in spite of 
the problems her life held for her here, she experienced 
nevertheless each time she went away such a poignant home¬ 
sickness for Paris, its streets, its sounds, its river-banks and 
its buildings, that she invariably came back in a tremor of 
fear, positively “jumpy” at the thought that perhaps during 
her absence it had changed or disappeared off the map alto¬ 
gether? If she felt like this after a month’s sojourn in 
Italy, what had I now to fear I asked myself ? Had we not 
initiated her into the very secret heart of Paris ? Was there 
a remnant of an old and lovely building that we had not 
shown her, or a fragment of sculpture or a picture worth 
looking at to which we had not introduced her? Had she 
not come to feel with us the difference of the temperature 
and tone of the streets, the excitement of the jangling boule¬ 
vards, the bland oblivion of the Place de la Concorde, the 
ghostliness of the Place des Vosges, the intimate provincial 
secretiveness of our own old peaceable quarter? Had not 
Ludovic called into being for her out of the embers of his 
fire the historic scenes that had been enacted in all these and 
a hundred other places? Had he not made the whole rich 
fantastic past of our city unroll itself before her eyes? 
Was it a little thing to be allowed to drink at the source of 


12 


Jane—Our Stranger 

so much humanized knowledge ? Where in that new 
country of hers would she find so fanciful and patient and 
tender a friend as this great scholar? 

So I piled up the evidence, and then when her letter came 
I knew that I had foreseen the truth, and when I took them 
the news and they all cried out to me—“Go and bring her 
back, and don’t come back without her”—I knew while their 
high commanding voices were still sounding in my ears that 
already I had made up my mind to go, and I knew too, 
lastly and finally, that I would not be able to bring her back. 

She had enclosed in her letter to me a note for them which 
I gave to Clementine, who read it and passed it on. One 
after another they scanned its meagre lines in silence. I saw 
that Ludovic’s hand was shaking. When he had finished he 
closed his eyes for a moment and his head jerked forward. 
I noticed in the light of the lamp how white he had grown 
in the last year, and how the yellow tint of his pallor had 
deepened. Clementine said looking at me—“It is not intelli¬ 
gible. Perhaps you can explain.” And I was given the 
sheet of paper covered with Jane’s large careless scrawl: 

“Dear Friends,” I read, “I am not coming back. I am here 
alone with the ghost of my Aunt Patty in the house where I 
lived as a child. It is a wooden house with a verandah at the 
back. There are snow-drifts on the verandah. I am trying to 
find out what it has all been about—my life, I mean. If I 
believed that I would understand over there on the other side 
of death, then perhaps I would not be bound to stay here now, 
but I know that Ludovic is right, and that the hope of eternal 
punishment like that of immortal bliss and satisfied knowledge 
is just the fiction of our vanity. My punishment is on me now, 
since among other things I have to give you up. 

“Jane.” 

They had cried out at me when I told them, but after 
reading the letter they were silent. It was as if they had 
been brushed by the wings of some strange fearful messen¬ 
ger from another world, as if some departed spirit were 


Jane—Our Stranger 13 

present. We might all have been sitting in the dark with in¬ 
visible clammy hands touching our hair, so nervous had we 
become. The fall of a charred log in the fireplace made us 
jump. 

Felix forced a laugh. “The ghost of her Aunt Patty,” 
he mocked dismally. “Now what does she mean by that?” 

“Her Aunt Patty was the person who took care of her as 
a child. Miss Patience Forbes her name was. She seems 
to have been a remarkable character. Jane often spoke of 
her.” 

My words only added to their mystification. An old maid 
in America, dead now, a remarkable character. What had 
she to do with them? What power had she over their 
brilliant courageous Jane? Were they nothing that 
they could be replaced by the wraith of an old puritan 
spinster ? 

The room seemed to grow chilly. Some one put a fresh 
log on the fire. A little fitful wind was whimpering at the 
windows. Now and then a gust of rain pattered against the 
glass with a light rapid sound like finger-tips tapping. 
Felix had wandered away down the long dim room, his 
hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched as he stood with 
his back to us, and his nose close to the packed shelves of 
books against the farther wall. The tiny gilt letterings on 
the old bindings glimmered faintly in the lamplight. He 
seemed to be searching among all those little dim signs for 
an explanation. Far away beyond the network of gardens 
and old muffling houses one heard from some distant street 
the hoot of a motor. From the translucent depths of gleam¬ 
ing glass cabinets the small mute mysterious figures of 
jewelled heathen gods and little bronze Buddhas and curious 
carved jade monsters iooked out at us as if through sheets 
of water. 

Under the aged shadowy eaves of that room, full of 
strange old symbols and rare books and still rarer manu¬ 
scripts, where so many ideas and faiths and records had 
been sifted, examined and relegated to dusty recesses, its 


14 Jane—Our Stranger 

occupants remained silent, staring at the new disturbing 
object of their mystification. Clementine, tucked into a 
corner of the sofa, her boyish head that she dyed such a 
bad colour, on her hand, scrutinized the tip of her foot that 
she held high as if for better observation, in one of her 
characteristic angular attitudes. Her slipper dangled loose 
from her toe; now and then she gave it a jerk of annoyance. 

They tried to take in the meaning of what they had read. 
The emotional content of that scrawled page was so strange 
to them as to appear almost shocking. They were rather 
frightened. Here indeed their philosophy of laughter broke 
down, for they loved Jane and could not make fun of her 
superstitions. 

“We were never hard on her. We treated her gently.” 

“Even when her seriousness bored us we were patient.” 

“She can’t have loved us. We have never really known 
her then, after all.” 

Clementine jerked about. “I was always wanting her to 
take lovers. She wanted me to give up mine. Poor child— 
we were friends all the same.” 

Felix’s falsetto came down to us in a shrill wail of exas¬ 
peration. 

“But we never attacked her religion. We left her alone. 
We were good to her.” 

Clementine nodded. “Yes, we were good.” 

I remembered the day I had first brought Jane to them, 
clothed in her silks and sables, glittering with the garish light 
of her millions and her high cold social activities. I had 
brought her straight from the preposterous palace she had 
let Philibert build her to this deep dim nook where we 
laughed and scoffed at the world she lived in. I had been 
nervous then. I had been afraid they would find her im¬ 
possible. But they had seen through the barbarous trap¬ 
pings, intelligent souls that they were. Hadn’t she realized 
how they had honoured her? Hadn’t she known what de¬ 
pendable people they were ? 

I heard Clementine say it again. “We were good, but she 


Jane—Our Stranger 15 

thought we were wicked because we broke the ten command¬ 
ments. She thought a lot of the ten commandments. ,, 

“It was the puritan spinster looking at us over her 
shoulder all the time.” 

And still they pondered and puzzled, bewildered, de¬ 
pressed, at a loss, annoyed by their incapacity to picture to 
themselves even so much as the place where she was, alone 
at that moment. “St. Mary’s Plains, Mohican County, 
Michigan” was the address she gave. What an address to 
expect any one to take seriously. If it had been a joke the 
mixture of images would perhaps have conveyed something 
to them, but as a serious geographic sign they could do 
nothing with it. It had the character of a new glazed bill¬ 
board, of a big glaring advertisement for some parvenu’s 
patent. To think of Jane sitting down away off there in the 
middle of a desert under it was too much for them. But 
the very outrageousness of the enigma helped them. 

“She couldn’t do it from inclination,” some one of them 
said at last. “There must have been something terrible.” 

Then it was that Ludovic startled us. He spoke slowly 
as if to himself. 

“She was only beginning to learn how little conduct has 
to do with life. For others she had come to understand that 
what one does has little or no relation to what one is. I 
am convinced that she, poor child, is persuaded that she has 
committed some dreadful crime.” 

But it was Clementine who said the last word that I 
carried away with me. 

“If she hadn’t married into your family,” she said, glaring 
out at me from the door of her taxi, “she would have been 
all right. Why, she should have chosen Philibert—” 

“But, cherie amie, she didn’t. It was her mother who did 
it all.” 

“Rubbish! She loved him. She loves him still.” 


II 


M Y mother was a Mirecourt. The family was of 
a prouder nobility than my father’s. Her people 
were of the Grand Chevaux de Lorraine . They 
fought with the English against the kings of France in the 
fourteenth century. One reads about them as fighters 
during several hundreds of years beginning with the Cru¬ 
sades. Sometimes they were on the right side, sometimes 
on the wrong. Later generations were not proud of the 
part they played in the siege of Orleans. But they were 
proud people and acted on caprice or in self-interest with 
a sublime belief in themselves. They did not like kings and 
were loth to give allegiance to any one. When Louis XI 
took away their lands, they went over to the king, but it 
is to be gathered from the letters of the time that they con¬ 
sidered no king their equal. Richelieu was too much for 
them. He reduced them to poverty. To repair the damage 
the head of the family made a bourgeois marriage. They 
were sure of themselves in those days. Marrying money 
caused them no uneasiness nor fear of ridicule. My mother 
said one day when talking of Philibert and Jane—“We have 
done this sort of thing before but always with people of our 
own race who had a proper attitude. With foreigners one 
never knows.” 

My father was a Breton. Anne of Brittany was the liege 
lady of his people. His aieux were worthy gentlemen who 
played an obscure but on the whole respectable part in 
history. An occasional spendthrift appeared now and then 
among them to add gaiety to their monotonous lives. The 
spendthrifts being few and the tenacity of the others very 
great, they amassed a considerable fortune and were en- 

16 


Jane—Our Stranger 17 

nobled by Louis XIV: a fact of which my aunt Clothilde 
used occasionally to remind us. Aunt Clothilde was my 
father’s sister. She had made a great match in marrying 
the first Duke of France, but she seemed to think nothing 
of that nor to have any consciousness of the obligations of 
her class. She made fun of the legitimists, scoffed at the 
idea of a restoration and despised the Due d’Orleans for the 
way he behaved in England. She and my mother did not 
get on. My mother thought her vulgar. She was, but it 
didn’t detract from her being a very great lady. She was 
always enormously fat, a greedy, wicked old thing, with a 
ribald mind, but with a tremendous chic. Philibert called 
her La Gargantua. She was Rabelaisian somehow. I liked 
her. She never seemed conscious of my being different 
from other men, and she was kinder to Jane than the others. 

There were a great many others. We made a large clan. 
It seemed strange to Jane that half the people in Paris were 
our cousins or uncles or aunts. But of course it is like that. 
One is related to everybody. 

As a family we had the reputation of having very nice 
manners. It was thought that we knew very well how to 
make ourselves agreeable and what was more characteristic, 
how to be disagreeable without giving offense. My mother 
was reputed to be the only woman in Paris who could refuse 
an invitation to dinner in the same house six times running 
without making an enemy of its mistress. My mother was 
perpetually penning little plaintive notes of regret. She was 
greatly sought after and stayed very much at home. After 
my father’s death it became more and more difficult to get 
her to go anywhere, but she liked being asked so that she 
could refuse. The result was that she became something 
precious, inapproachable, a legend of good form and grace 
and she remained this always. I have on my table a minia¬ 
ture of her painted when she was married, at the age of 
eighteen. She was never a beauty. A slip of a thing, gentle 
and pale, with dark ringlets and very bright intelligent eyes. 
Her power of seduction was a thing that emanated from her 


18 Jane—Our Stranger 

like a perfume, indefinable and elusive. Claire, my sister, 
has the same quality. 

One of my mother’s special pleasures as she grew older 
consisted in having her dinner in bed on some grand gala 
evening, and telling herself that she was the only lady of any 
importance in Paris who had refused to be present. Some¬ 
times on such evenings she would send for me to come and 
sit with her for an hour. I would find her propped up on 
her pillows, her eyes glowing with animation under the soft 
old-fashioned frill of her voluminous boudoir cap, and 
presently I would become aware that she was submitting me 
to all the play of her wit and her charm, and I would know 
that out of a pure spirit of contradiction she was giving me, 
her poor ugly duckling, the treat that she had withheld from 
that brilliant gathering, whether to amuse me most or her¬ 
self it would be difficult to tell. We understand each other. 
Her manner to me was always perfect. It was a beautiful 
and elaborate denial of the fact that my deformity was un¬ 
pleasant to her. She went to a lot of trouble to pretend that 
she liked having me about. If she wanted a cab called in 
the rain and there wasn’t a servant handy—we didn’t have 
too many—it was a part of her delicacy to ask me to do it 
rather than have me think that she had my infirmity con¬ 
stantly on her mind. If she required an escort to some pub¬ 
lic place she would choose me rather than Philibert, but she 
would not always choose me, lest I should come to feel that 
she forced herself to do so. She had the humblest way of 
asking my advice, and then when she did not take it, went to 
the most childlike manoeuvres to deceive me and make me 
think she had. When I came back from school in England, 
I remember wondering what she would do about me and 
her friends. She had an evening a week and received on 
these occasions a number of stiff old gentlemen and gossipy 
dowagers, a handful of priests and all the aunts and uncles 
and cousins. The question for her was whether she should 
inflict on me the penance. <of talking to these people in order 
to show me that she liked to have me about, or whether she 


Jane—Our Stranger 19 

would let me off attendance and trust to my superior under¬ 
standing to assume that I was in her eyes presentable. I 
believe she would have decided on the latter bolder plan, had 
I not taken the matter out of her hands by asking her to 
excuse me. Her answer was characteristic. 

“But naturally, mon enfant. You don’t suppose that 
I think these old people fit company for you. Only if it’s 
not indiscreet, tell me sometimes about your doings. I, at 
least, am not too old nor yet too young to be told.” 

Dear mother. She would have gone to the length of im¬ 
puting to me a dozen mistresses if she had thought that 
would help me. And yet in spite of it all, perhaps just be¬ 
cause of it all, I knew that the sight of me was intolerable 
to her. But this I feel sure was a thing that she never knew 
that I knew. It was a part of my business in life never to 
let her find it out. 

My being sent to England to school had been to me a 
proof. Though my father had taken the decision I knew it 
was to get me out of my mother’s way. It was not the 
habit of our family to send its sons abroad for their educa¬ 
tion. Philibert had had tutors at home. None of my 
cousins had gone away. We were as a clan not at all given 
to travelling. In the extreme sensitiveness that engulfed 
me like an illness during a certain period of my youth, I had 
told myself bitterly that I was banished because they could 
not abide the sight of me, but my bitterness did not last, 
thank God; and when after my father’s death I came home 
to live, I set myself to matching my mother’s delicacy with 
my own. I arranged to convey to her the impression of 
being always at hand and yet I managed to be actually in 
her presence a minimum of time. I did things for her that 
I could do without being aggravatingly near her; such things 
as running errands and visiting her lawyer and looking after 
her meagre investments, accumulating these duties while at 
the same time I withdrew more and more from sharing in 
her social activities. 

I had kept, for reasons of economy and in order to be 


20 


Jane—Our Stranger 

near her, my apartment in a wing of her house over the 
porters lodge, in that part of the building that screened the 
house from the street. My windows looked on the one side 
across the street into some gardens and on the other side 
into our court yard. From my dressing-room I had a view 
of my mother’s graceful front door with the wide shallow 
steps before it and the gravel expanse of the inner carriage 
drive. Sometimes when I came home in the evening, 
Madame Oui, the concierge's wife, would tap on the glass 
in her door that was just opposite my own little entrance 
behind the great double portals that barred us into our 
stronghold, and would tell me that my mother had come in 
and would like to see me. Or I would find a note bidding 
me come to her lying on my table. She wrote me a great 
number of notes, sprightly amusing missives that reminded 
one of the fact that Frenchwomen have been for centuries 
mistresses in the art of letter-writing. They gave me the 
news, recounted the latest family gossip, contained tips as 
to how to behave if I came across an aunt who owed her 
money, or an uncle who had lent her some, warned me 
against this or that person whom she did not want to see any 
more, asked me to pay a call on one of her ancient followers 
who was in bed with a cold, enclosed a tiresome bill that she 
hadn’t the money to pay immediately, or implored me in witty 
phrases of complaint to use my influence with Philibert 
and try to get him away from some woman: in all of 
which matters I did my best to meet her wishes save as 
regarded my brother. “My influence with Philibert” was 
one of my mother’s least successful fictions. I wonder 
even now that she kept it up. I suppose it would have 
seemed to her shocking to admit even tacitly that her two 
sons never spoke to each other if they could help it. Yet 
she must have known that although he lived nominally in 
my mother’s house up to the time of his marriage I scarcely 
ever saw him unless at a distance in some crowded salon. 
The few mutual friends we possessed never asked us to 
dinner or lunch together, and strangely enough in the one 


21 


Jane—Our Stranger 

place where we might -often have happened to come across 
one another, that is in my mother’s own boudoir, we never 
did meet. My mother must have managed this. She must 
have manoeuvred to prevent such encounters. She arranged 
to see us always separately and yet continued to talk to us, 
each to the other, as if she supposed that beyond her door we 
were amusing ourselves together, thick as thieves. 

She would say—“I hear this latest friend of Philibert’s 
whom he has so made the mode this year, is really quite 
pretty. Tell me what she looks like,”—assuming me 
to be perfectly aware of this affair. Or—“Your brother’s 
new tailor is not successful at all. He gives him the 
most exaggerated shoulders. Fifi is not tall enough to 
stand it. I wish you would get him to go back to the old 
one.” Or even—“Tell me what your brother is up to. I 
never see him.” As if I knew what Philibert was up to. 

My rare meetings with him took place at my sister’s. 
She used sometimes to have us at her house together. Her 
husband would bring him home to lunch unexpectedly, or 
I would drop in unbidden and find him there. Poor Claire 
had married the biggest automobile works in the country, 
and had been taken to Neuilly and shut up there in a gi¬ 
gantic villa. She was finding that it tasked her philosophical 
docility to the utmost to meet the demands of the uxorious 
individual who paid all her bills from his own cheque book 
and was generous only in the way of supplying her with 
babies. She had had four in six years, and her health was 
a source of anxiety to my mother, who was frankly exasper¬ 
ated by the turn her daughter’s affairs had taken. 

“My dear,” she said to me one night on her return from 
Neuilly, “I supposed that that man had married Claire to 
get into society, and now that I’ve given her to him he 
has taken her off to the wilderness. I don’t know what to 
make of it. The poor child is wasting away. He simply 
never leaves her alone. They go to bed together every 
night at ten o’clock. It is horrible.” 

Claire may have bemoaned her lot to my mother in those 


22 


Jane—Our Stranger 

long tete-a-tetes of theirs, but she never complained to me, 
nor did she, I believe, to Philibert, who was in the habit of 
borrowing money from her large, oily, sleek-headed husband. 
She had some of my mother’s mannerisms, her little way of 
quickly moving her head backwards with the slightest toss; 
the same light flexible utterance; the same sigh and sudden 
droop of irrepressible languor. I believe her to be the 
only person of whom Philibert was ever unselfishly fond. 
She pleased him. Her physical frailty, appealed to his taste 
which was in reality so fastidious, however vulgar some of 
his amusements might be, and her mocking spirit was con¬ 
genial to him. When one thought of Claire one thought of 
her dark shadowed eyes with the deep circles under them 
marking the tender cheeks, and her truly beautiful smile. 
She was a collection of odd beauties combined in a way to 
make one’s heart ache, but there was something sharp in her 
—something hurting. Lovely Claire, cynical siren, how 
caressingly she spoke to me, how she drew out of my heart 
its tenderness, and how often she disappointed me. Not 
brave enough to be happy, far too intelligent not to know 
what she was missing, she took refuge in self-mockery and 
when faced with a crisis subsided into complete passivity. 

One evening in the early summer, more than twenty 
years ago now, I found* a note from my mother tucked in 
the crack of my door asking me to come to her at once as 
she had news for me of the utmost importance. I found 
my sister with her, and something in the attitude of the two 
women, who were so closely akin as to reproduce each one 
the same physical pose under the stress of a deep preoccupa¬ 
tion, conveyed to me a suspicion that Philibert had that 
moment skipped out through the long open window. They 
sat, each in a high brocaded chair, their heads thrown back 
against their respective cushions, their hands limp in their 
laps and their eyes half-closed. I thought for an instant 
that both had fainted. My mother was the first to make 
a sign. She lifted an arm and in silence pointed a finger 
at a chair for me. 


Jane—Our Stranger 23 

“Your brother,” she said, when once I was seated, “has 
sold this house over my head. He is going to be married.” 

“To a little American girl,” breathed Claire. 

“The fortune is immense,” added my mother. 

“The daughter of that awful smart Mrs. Carpenter,” said 
Claire, opening wide her eyes the better to take in the horror. 

“She asked me three times to luncheon,” said my mother. 
“I have never seen her.” 

I looked from one to the other—“But if the fortune is 
immense—” I ventured. 

“It is all tied up,” wailed my mother. “Her trustees 
insist on his debts being paid beforehand. I understand 
nothing—but nothing.” Her head dropped forward. She 
pressed her thumb and forefinger against her worn eye¬ 
lids. She began to cry. 

Claire, with a strange sidelong look at her expressive of 
compassion and exasperation and wonder, got up and walked 
to the window and stood with her back to us looking out 
into the garden. 

“I should have thought my son-fn-law would have saved 
me this humiliation,” said my mother, fumbling with her 
left hand for her handkerchief. “But Claire says he has 
already lent Philibert very considerable sums.” I saw my 
sister’s slender figure stiffen. “What curious people 
Americans are. It seems that the father made such 
a will as passes belief. The child comes into the entire 
fortune but can only dispose of the income. The mother 
has an annuity, Claire says it must be a big one as she 
entertains a great deal. Why did you not tell me your 
brother was getting so dreadfully into debt? The girl is 
just eighteen. It appears that in America girls reach their 
majority at eighteen. Her name is Jane. A most un¬ 
pleasant name. Philibert says she is not pretty. These 
mesalliances are so tiresome. If only he could have married 
that exquisite little Bianca. I shall be obliged to receive the 
mother. I am sure she has a very strong accent.” 

My^oor mother stretched out her hand to me. “What is 


24 Jane—Our Stranger 

to become of us?” she wailed gently. I felt very sorry 
for her. I understood that she was afraid of the invasion 
of a horde of big noisy strangers. I tried to comfort her. 
She seemed to me for the first time pitiful, and I saw that 
her youthfulness was after all, just one of the illusions she 
cast by the exercise of her will. It fell from her that eve¬ 
ning as if it had been some gossamer veil destroyed by her 
tears. 

Claire remained silent. Only once during all my mother’s 
broken lament did she speak, and then she said without 
turning—“I should have thought one such marriage in a 
family was enough.” 

It transpired that Philibert needed five hundred thousand 
francs to put him straight, that the house was being sold 
for a million and that the remaining half was my mother’s, 
since they owned the property between them. He had 
brought her the deed of sale to sign that afternoon, and 
had gone away with the signature in his pocket. She said— 
“Naturally I could not refuse. It is not as if he could have 
sold half the building.” 

I felt humiliated for my mother. It seemed to me that 
my brother had injured her in a most offensive way. 
There was a kind of indecency about the proceeding that 
made me ashamed. It was the kind of thing I had hoped 
we were none of us capable of doing. He was taking 
away from her not only her shelter and security, but a part 
of her own personality. It was as outrageous as if he 
had forced her to cut off her hair and had taken it round 
to a wigmaker to turn into a handful of gold. I saw that 
without that fine old house, so like her own self expressed 
in architecture, with its bland and graceful exterior and 
delicate ornamented rooms, she would lose a vital part of 
her entity. She was not one of those people whose public 
and private selves are distinct. The proud little bright¬ 
eyed lady who drove out of those stately doors in her 
brougham to dispense finely gradated smiles to the meti¬ 
culously selected people of her acquaintance, and the pas- 


Jane—Our Stranger 25 

sionate intriguing mother so given to subterfuges of kindness 
and ineffable make-believe of disinterested affection, were 
one and the same person. She had no special manner for 
the world. There was no homely naturalness for her to 
subside into, no loose woolly dressing-gown of conduct and 
no rough carpet slippers of laziness to don in the presence 
of her family or by her lonely self. What she was when in 
attendance on the Bourbons that she was in her own silent 
bedroom. Even about her weeping there was a certain 
style. Her tears were pitiful but not ugly. They had de¬ 
stroyed the illusion of her youthfulness, but they had not 
marred her elegance. There was measure and appropriate¬ 
ness and dramatic worth in her' weeping. Her son had 
not broken her heart or her spirit; he had merely dragged off 
some of her clothing. She stood denuded, impoverished, 
a little shrunken in stature, that was all. It was that that 
enraged me. I said—“What a brute.” My mother pulled 
me up sharply. 

“My son,” she said to me, with more of haughtiness than 
I had ever seen in her manner to any one of us. “I have 
consented to do what your brother has asked. I have 
approved of his conduct. That is sufficient.” 

I felt then the finality, the hopelessness. I believe I 
smiled. The change was sudden. It had always been like 
that with mother. She might complain of Philibert but 
no one could criticize him to her. 

“Ah, well,” I said, “if you have made up your mind to 
accept her—” 

Mother lifted her head quickly. “Whom?” 

“Your new daughter-in-law.” 

I am almost sure that she turned pale. I cannot have 
imagined it. Her words too, gave me the same painful im¬ 
pression. 

“I have accepted it, not her, as yet.” 

And suddenly I thought of the girl, Jane Carpenter, 
whom I had not yet laid eyes on, with an immense pity. 

“Yes,” said Claire, coming back to us, and looking at us 


26 Jane—Our Stranger 

with her least charming, most bitterly mocking air. “We 
prepare a nice welcome for her. I wonder how she will 
like us.” 

But my mother had the last word. 

“We shall, I presume, know how to make ourselves 
agreeable,” she said, putting away her handkerchief into 
her little silk bag. I saw that she would shed no more 
tears over the girl, Jane Carpenter. 


Ill 


M RS. CARPENTER was an American who apolo¬ 
gized for her own country. She had found it in¬ 
capable of providing a sufficient field of activity 
for her social talents and called it crude. The phrase on 
her lips was funny. There was much about her that was 
funny, since one could not in the face of her bright brisk 
self-satisfaction call her pathetic. 

The flattery of such migrations as hers is mystifying 
to Parisians like myself, who know that our city is the 
most delightful place in the world, but do not quite under¬ 
stand why so many foreigners like Mrs. Carpenter should 
find it so. She seemed to derive an immense satisfaction 
from the fact that she lived in Paris. But why? Where 
lay the magic difference between her Paris and her New 
York? She had established herself in a large bright apart¬ 
ment in the Avenue du Bois de Bologne. Her rent was 
high, her furniture expensive, her table lavish, her motor 
had pale grey cushions and silver trimmings. All these 
things she could have had in New York. She might have 
paid a little more for them over there, but that would only 
have added to her pleasure. She liked to pay high prices 
for things. It may be that I am doing her an injustice. 
There were moments when her indefatigable pursuit of us 
all filled me with scornful pity and made me think that 
she did hide under her breezy successful manner a wistful 
and romantic admiration for things that were foreign and 
old, and a touching respect for things she did not under¬ 
stand. She once told me that she had wanted to take an 
old hotel in our quarter, something with atmosphere and 
a history and old-world charm. But somehow she had not 

27 


28 Jane—Our Stranger 

found what she wanted. The houses she saw were dark 
and gloomy and insanitary. They were wonderfully ro¬ 
mantic but they had no bathrooms. She had wanted one 
in particular, had wanted it awfully, but the owner had 
insisted on staying on in little rooms under the roof, which 
meant his using her front stairs, so at last she had given 
up the idea. Her apartment was certainly not gloomy. 
It glittered with gold—golden walls, gold plate, gilt chairs. 
She ended by liking it immensely, but was sometimes a 
little ashamed of being so pleased with it. Perhaps, at 
odd moments, she called it crude. 

I used to go there sometimes, long before Jane came to 
Paris. I am sorry now that I did. Had I known Mrs. 
Carpenter was going to be, for me, Jane’s mother, I would 
not have gone. It is not nice to remember that I used to 
make fun of Jane’s mother, and accept her hospitality 
with amused contempt. We all did. She was to us an 
object of good-humoured derision. Poor old Izzy. She 
fed us so well; she begged us so continually to come. She 
seemed to derive such pleasure from hearing the butler 
announce our names. I am sure she believed that awful 
flat of hers to be the social centre of a very distinguished 
society. The more of a mixture the better to her mind:— 
Austrians, Hungarians, Poles,—she liked having princes 
about, and their dark furtive eyes and beautifully manicured 
hands filled her with joy. It was only after Philibert got 
hold of her that she began to understand that perhaps, after 
all, too cosmopolitan a salon was not quite the thing. Phili¬ 
bert took her in hand. He had learned somehow about 
Jane. He already had his idea. 

And now I come upon a curious problem. I find that two 
distinct Mrs. Carpenters exist in my mind, and I cannot 
reconcile them. One was a beautiful romantic creature 
whom Jane—far away in the Grey House in St. Mary’s 
Plains—called mother and wrote to once a week and loved 
with a pure flame of loyalty; the other was Izzy Carpen¬ 
ter, whose loud voice and tall elastic fashionable figure was 


Jane—Our Stranger 29 

so well-known in Paris: Busy Izzy, who was run by Phili¬ 
bert, and a group of young ne’er-do-weels. I find it very 
difficult to realize that this jolly slangy woman, with curly 
grey hair and a blue eye that could give a broad wink on 
occasion, was identical with the figure of poetry Jane 
dreamed about night after night in her little restless cot 
at the foot of her Aunt Patty’s four poster-bed. It is dis¬ 
turbing to think that even about this decided hard-edged viva¬ 
cious woman there should have been such a difference of 
opinion, such a contrast of received impressions as to make 
one wonder whether she had any corporeal existence at all. 
I think of that stern humorous spinster Patience Forbes 
comforting the child who was always asking questions about 
her mother; I think of her taking the aching young thing 
on her gaunt knees in the old rocking chair with its knitted 
worsted cushion, and lulling that troubled eager mind to 
rest with stories of her mother’s childhood. 

I can see the grim face of Patience Forbes while she 
searches her memory for pleasant things about her heartless 
prodigal sister. She sits in a bay window looking out into 
the back garden where there is a sleepy twittering of birds. 
The trams thunder past up Desmoine’s Avenue. The milk¬ 
man comes up the path; the white muslin curtains billow into 
the peaceful room that smells of lavender and mint. There 
is sunlight on the old mahogany. Jane’s great-grandmother, 
in an oval frame, looks down insipidly, her eyes mildly 
shining between the low bands of her parted hair. And 
Jane has her arms round her Aunt Patty, and her face, so 
unlike the gentle portrait, is troubled and brooding, a sullen 
ugly little face with something strange, half wild, that recalls 
her father and frightens the good woman who holds her close 
and goes on answering questions about her sister Isabel. 
And then I think of Mrs. Carpenter not as Jane’s mother, 
but as the daughter of old Mrs. Forbes of the Grey House, 
and I am again bewildered. Those people in St. Mary’s 
Plains, Jane’s grandmother, her aunts and her uncle, were 
people of sense and character and taste. Who that knew 


30 Jane—Our Stranger 

Izzy Carpenter would have thought it? Who that knew 
Jane could deny it? I suspect Mrs. Carpenter of having 
been ashamed of them. Jane’s loyalty saved her from any 
such stupidity. 

When I went to St. Mary’s Plains the other day, Jane 
showed me, on the wall of her uncle’s study, an old print 
representing the first log cabin of the French settler who 
had come there across the Canadian border in 1780. In 
the picture a Red Indian carrying a tomahawk and capped 
with feathers skulks behind the trees at the edge of the 
clearing, and in the foreground a group of Noah’s Ark 
cattle are guarded by a man with a gun. Under the print is 
written—“St. Marie les Plaines,” and the signature “Gilbert 
de Chevigne.” It was a Monsieur de Chevigne from Que¬ 
bec, Jane told me, who built the Grey House. The name 
had been corrupted to Cheney; the Cheneys were her grand¬ 
mother’s people. Many of the families in St. Mary’s 
Plains traced a similar history. The town in growing had 
cherished the story of its French foundation and its social 
element had grown to believe that it had a special sympathy 
with our country. Its well-to-do people were constantly 
coming from and going to France. With an indifference 
bordering on contempt, and an ease that suggested the con¬ 
sciousness of special claims and opportunities, they would 
cross the really tremendous expanse of territory that lay be¬ 
tween their thresholds and the Atlantic sea-board, ignoring 
the existence of Chicago, Buffalo, Boston, Philadelphia and 
New York, and set sail for Cherbourg. It was considered a 
perfectly natural occurrence and one scarcely worthy of self- 
congratulation for a girl from St. Mary’s Plains to marry 
a foreigner of real of supposed distinction, but those who 
neither married abroad nor at home, but were led astray by 
the vulgar attraction of some rich man from the far west 
or east were the subject of pitying criticism. Such had 
been the case with Jane’s mother. Silas Carpenter had come 
bearing down on St. Mary’s Plains, a wild man from the 
great west; like a bison or a moose breaking into a mild 


Jane—Our Stranger 31 

and pleasant paddock. Isabel Forbes, headstrong, discon¬ 
tented, covetous, had fallen to his savage charm, his millions 
and the peculiar oppressive magnetism of his silence, that 
seemed filled with the memories of unspeakable experiences. 
The first rush to the goldfields of California loomed in the 
background of his untutored childhood. Later he had gone 
to the Klondike. Gold—he had dug it out of the earth with 
his own great hands. Then he had taught himself oddly 
from books. A speculator, a gambler, he had a passion for 
music, and played the flute. A strange mixture. To please 
Isabel’s family he gave up poker, went to church, was 
married in a frock-coat. People said he had Indian blood in 
his veins. It seems possible. He had the long head and 
slanting profile and the mild voice characteristic of the race. 
Society in St. Mary’s Plains was genuinely sorry for Isabel’s 
family when she married him. But she went away to New 
York to live and was forgotten until on Silas’ sensational 
death her departure for Paris revived interest in her doings. 

“The Grey House” as it was known in St. Mary’s Plains, 
had the benevolent patriarchal air of a small provincial 
manor. Built sometime in the seventies it had not had 
too many coats of paint during its lifetime, and its calm 
exterior with the double row of comfortable windows each 
flanked by a pair of shutters was weather-stained and worn 
like the visage of some bland unconcerned person of dis¬ 
tinction who is not ashamed to look in his old age a little 
like a weather-beaten peasant. It stood well back from 
the street in the centre of a wide plot of ground not large 
enough to be called a park, though containing a few nice trees. 
The lawn indeed merged in the most sociable way into the 
grounds of other neighbouring houses and ran smoothly 
down in front to the edge of the public side-walk where 
there was no wall or railing of any kind. A scarcely notice¬ 
able sign beside the path that led from the street to the 
front porch with its two wooden pillars said “Keep off the 
grass.” 

There were only two storeys to the Grey House and a 


32 Jane—Our Stranger 

garret with dormer windows in the grey shingled roof, the 
the rooms of the ground floor being raised only a foot or two 
from the level of the street, so that Jane’s grandmother, sit¬ 
ting in her armchair by the living-room window could look 
up over the tops of her spectacles and see and recognize 
her acquaintances who often even at that comfortable dis¬ 
tance would bow or lift their hats to the little old lady as 
they passed. 

Every one in St. Mary’s Plains knew the Grey House. 
When one of the Misses Forbes went shopping, she would 
say “Send it to the Grey House, please,” and the young 
man in the dry goods’ store would answer—“Certainly, 
Miss Forbes, it’ll be right along. Mrs. Forbes is keeping 
well, I hope? Let me see it’s ten years since I was in her 
Sunday-school class.” And Miss Minnie—it was usually 
Minnie who did the shopping—would smile kindly at the 
chatty young man who certainly did not mean any harm. 

The occupants of that house were people content to stay 
at home, who did not always know what day of the month 
it was, and who found a deep source of well-being in the 
realization that tomorrow would be like today. I imagine 
those gentlewomen doing the same thing in the same way 
year after year, wearing the same clothes made by the same 
family dressmaker, and opposing to the disturbing menace 
of events the quiet obstinacy of their contentment. I watch 
them at night go up the stairs together at ten o’clock, 
kiss one another at the door of their mother’s room and go 
down the dim corridor, Patty staying behind like a sentinel 
under the gas-jet, her bony arm lifted, waiting to turn the 
light still lower once they were safe behind their own closed 
doors. Jane in her bed used to hear their voices saying, 
“Good-night, mother dear, pleasant dreams. Good-night, 
Minnie. Good-night.” And if the man of the house, Jane’s 
Uncle Bradford, were at his club playing whist, Beth, from 
the rosy interior of her cretonne chamber would be sure 
to call out—“I left the front door on the latch for Brad. 
I suppose it’s all right.” And Patience would say—“Who 


Jane—Our Stranger 33 

would burgle this house?” And Minnie would add—“I 
put his glass of milk in his room.” And then there would 
be silence disturbed only by the sound of footsteps moving 
to and fro behind closed doors. And Jane would 
wait drowsily for Aunt Patty to come in and say “Good 
gracious, child, not asleep yet? It’s past ten o’clock.” 

To the Forbes family the doings of the outer world were 
a pleasant distant spectacle that interested and amused but 
made them feel all the happier to be where they were. 
When a letter arrived from Izzy bearing its Paris post¬ 
mark, they would read it together, become pleasantly ani¬ 
mated over the news and then settle down with relief at the 
thought that they didn’t have to go over there and do all 
those things. The letter would then be added to a package 
bound with an elastic band and put away in the secretary 
until some one came to call and asked how Isabel was getting 
on. 

I seem to see them all, on these occasions, sitting there 
in their habitual attitudes. I imagine the little grandmother, 
with the letter open in her black silk lap, adjusting her 
spectacles on the slender bridge of her arched nose, and 
Jane on a footstool beside her, waiting to listen once more 
with absorbing interest to the extracts from her mother’s 
letter that she already knew by heart, and the two or three 
friends sitting round rather primly on the old mahogany 
chairs, and Aunt Beth with her embroidery on the horsehair 
sofa, and Aunt Minnie making the tea, and Aunt Patty 
teaching one of her birds to eat from her lips at the wind- 
dow, and perhaps Uncle Bradford, who has come home from 
his office, visible across the hall through the door in his 
study with some weighty volume on his knees, and a good 
cigar between his lips. I seem to hear the purring song 
of the tea kettle and the pleasant sound of voices calling 
one another intimate names. I see the faded carpet with its 
dimmed white pattern and the stiff green brocaded curtains 
in their high gilt cornices, and the pleasant mixture of 
heterogeneous objects selected for use and comfort. I have 


34 Jane—Our Stranger 

in my nostrils the perfume of roses opening out in the 
warmth of the room, and of the newly baked cakes made for 
tea by Aunt Minnie, and still another finer perfume, the 
faint fresh fragrance of the spirit of that little old lady 
who ruled the house in gentleness and was beloved in the 
town. A humourous little old lady who was not afraid 
of death, and believed in the clemency of a Divine Father. 
She liked Jane to read aloud to her while she knitted,— 
Trollope, Charles Lamb, Robert Burns, were her favourites, 
and s'he enjoyed a good tune on the piano, and would beat 
time with her knitting needles when Beth played a waltz. 
But on Sundays Beth played hymns and the servants came 
in after supper to sing with the family “Rock of Ages,” 
“Jesus Lover of my Soul,” “Abide with Me.” Jane liked 
those Sunday evenings. They made her feel so safe, was 
the way she put it. 

All the inmates of the Grey House were God-fearing but 
Minnie was the most religious. She had a talent for cook¬ 
ing and a craving for emotional religious experience. The 
kitchen of the Grey House was a very pleasant place with 
a window that gave onto the back verandah, and often on 
summer mornings Aunt Beth who was young and pretty, 
would take her sewing out onto this back porch while 
Aunt Minnie in the kitchen was making cakes, and they 
would talk through the open window with Jane curled up 
in the hammock beside Beth’s work-table. Beth, would call 
out in her very high small voice that expressed her plaintive 
dependence and blissful confidence in the protected life she 
so utterly loved—“Minnie, Minnie!” and the sound of the 
egg-beater in the kitchen would cease, and Aunt Minnie 
would call through the open window in her lower, deeper 
tone— 

“Yes, what do you say?” 

“I forgot to tell you that Mrs. Blatchford asked me if 
I’d ask you to make six cakes for the Woman’s Exchange 
Fourth of July Sale.” 

And Aunt Minnie would exclaim— 


Jane—Our Stranger 35 

“Good gracious. Six angel cakes, that makes thirty- 
six eggs.” While beating up the whites of eggs for her fa¬ 
mous cakes Minnie would ponder on the power of mind over 
matter, the healing of physical pain by faith, and the ultimate 
purifying grace of the Divine Spirit. One day she an¬ 
nounced that she had joined the Christian Science Church. 
The family took the news seriously. Jane’s grandmother 
turned very white. She leaned back in her chair and closed 
her eyes and whispered—“Oh, Minnie dear, I’m so sorry.” 
Uncle Bradford brought his fist down on a table with a 
crash and shouted—“Don’t you do it, Minnie. These new¬ 
fangled religions are no good.” Beth wept. Patience said 
“Hmph.” 

Jane didn’t like the new look on her Aunt Minnie’s face, 
but the religious mystery behind it had a worrying fascina¬ 
tion. She listened to the talk of her elders hoping to learn 
about this new faith, but it was characteristic of them not 
to argue or discuss things that affected them deeply, so 
she learned little, and she was afraid to ask her Aunt Pa¬ 
tience who seemed somehow not at all patient with Minnie 
just now. So she was reduced to talking it all over with 
Fan, her friend, who lived next door. They would sit 
astride the fence that divided the two back gardens and 
talk about God and their elders. 

“Aunt Minnie has got a new religion,” Jane announced. 
“Religions are funny things. I don’t think I like them but 
they do do things to you.” 

“Pooh! I know. It’s not half so queer as Mormons and 
Theosophites and Dowyites.” 

“What’s all that?” 

“The Mormons have lots of wives. They live in Salt 
Lake City and practice bigamy. The Dowyites are in Chi¬ 
cago. There’s a big church there full of crutches of all 
the lame people Dowy has cured by miracle.” 

“Well, Aunt Minnie says there’s no such thing as being 
lame or sick, and everything is a miracle.” 

“He-he! I’m not a miracle.” 


36 Jane—Our Stranger 

“Yes, you are.” 

“No, I’m not.” 

“Who made you?” 

“My mother.” 

“How?” 

“I dunno.” 

“Well, that’s a miracle.” 

“Oh, Jane, you are a silly.” 

“I’m not silly. I know you’ve got to have a religion or 
you can’t be good, but I don’t like it all the same.” 

“Who wants to be good?” 

“I do.” 

“Why?” 

“Because I’d be afraid to die.” 

Fan had a complete worldly wisdom that could cover 
most things, but she was obliged to admit, though with her 
nose in the air, that she, too, would be afraid to die if she 
went on being very bad up to the last minute. 

Fan Hazeltine was an orphan. She lived with a step¬ 
father who hated her and sometimes didn’t speak to her 
for a week. She and Jane had met on the back fence the 
day after Jane’s arrival in St. Mary’s Plains. Jane was 
six years old then, Fan eight, but I imagine that Fan was 
very much the same at that time, as when I met her twenty 
years later. She was always a wisp of a thing no bigger 
than an elf with a wizened face. Life gave her no leisure 
for expansion. She was one of those people who never 
had a chance to blossom out, but could just achieve the 
phenomenal business of continuing to exist by grit and 
the determination not to be downed. What she was in 
her stepfather’s inimical house that she remained in the 
larger inimical world, a small under-nourished undaunted 
creature, consumed with a thirst for happiness, hiding her 
hurts under an obstinate gaiety, a minute lonely thing steer¬ 
ing her bark cleverly through stormy waters, keeping afloat 
somehow, sinking and struggling, her grim little heart 
hardening, her laughter growing shriller and louder as the 


Jane—Our Stranger 37 

years went by. There is no difficulty about understanding 
Fan. I can see her astride that fence, screwing up her face 
while she told Jane what she was going to do in the world, 
and I can see her set about doing it. 

“I’m going to have a good time. You wait. You just 
wait. I tell you I’m going to have a good time—fun, fun, 
fun. That’s what I want.” 

But Jane did not say what she wanted from life. 


IV 


P ATIENCE FORBES was a woman of science, an 
ornithologist. When she died years ago she was 
recognized in America as one of the foremost authori¬ 
ties on birds. I remember her death. Jane got the news 
in Paris. It was at the time of the final struggle over 
Genevieve’s marriage. She showed me her Aunt Patience’s 
will. It read:—“To my beloved niece Jane Carpenter now 
known by the name of the Marquise de Joigny, I leave the 
Grey House and everything in it except my collections and 
manuscripts. These I leave to the Museum of St. Mary’s 
Plains. But the house and all the furniture I leave to 
Jane in case she may some day want some place to go.” 
Jane looked at me with strange eyes that day. 

“Isn’t it queer,” she said. “How could she have known?” 
But I understand now that Patience Forbes was the only 
one who did know. She must have been a shrewd woman. 
She must have followed Jane in her mind all those years, 
with extraordinary accuracy considering the little she had 
to go on. But she never betrayed her misgivings. There 
is only that sentence in her will to indicate what she thought. 

She was an imposing woman, plain of face, careless of 
her appearance and masculine in build. Her nose was 
crooked, her neck scrawny and her hands large and bony. 
But she had an air of grandeur. When she tramped through 
the woods or across the open country that surrounded St. 
Mary’s Plains, her field glasses and her camera slung across 
her shoulder, she had in spite of her quaint bonnet and 
long black clothes the look of a grizzled amazon. She 
would walk twenty miles in a day and frequently did so. 

38 


Jane—Our Stranger 39 

Many of the farmers round about knew her. They called 
her “the bird lady” and asked her in to their kitchens for 
a glass of milk and a slice of apple-pie, and often while 
sitting there with her bonnet strings untied and her dusty 
skirt turned up on her knees, she would receive gifts from 
sun-burned urchins who, knowing the object of her pil¬ 
grimages would bring to her in the battered straw crowns of 
their hats, rare birds’ eggs that they had discovered in the 
high branches of trees or the secret fastnesses of tangled 
thickets. 

She was the dominating personality in her own home. 
Her mother and sisters were a little afraid of her. When 
her brother Bradford married and she announced that she 
was going to hold classes in the parlour of the Grey House 
and charge for them, they dared not object, although they 
would have preferred going without the comforts that Brad¬ 
ford’s shared income had provided rather than have a lot 
of strange people invading the house. 

It was characteristic of the family that they never spoke 
to Jane of money and never gave her any idea that she was 
or ever would be an heiress. She made her own bed in the 
morning, and sometimes if she were not in too much of a 
hurry to get off to school she helped Aunt Minnie with the 
others. On Saturday mornings she darned her own stock¬ 
ings, or tried to, sitting on a low chair beside her grand¬ 
mother, but this was by way of a lesson in keeping quiet. 
I am afraid she took it as a matter of course that Aunt 
Beth and her grandmother should mend her clothes for 
her. 

She gave a great deal of trouble. Not only was she 
always getting into scrapes, but she was subject as well 
to storms of passion that sometimes, as she realized 
later, seriously frightened her grandmother. Her accidents 
—she had a great many little ones and one at least that was 
serious—were episodes marked in her memory as rather 
pleasant occasions that procured for her an extra amount of 
petting. There was a high bookcase at the top of the 


40 Jane—Our Stranger 

stairs in a dark corner of the upper hall, full of old 
and faded volumes. Here she spent hours together on 
Sunday afternoons, sitting on the top of a step-ladder that 
she dragged out of the housemaids’ cupboard. One day, 
finding among those dusty little books a copy of Dante’s 
“Vita Nuova,” she became so absorbed in the lovely poem, 
though it was only a lame translation in English verse, that 
she began chanting the lines to herself, unconsciously sway¬ 
ing backwards and forwards on her perch, until all at once 
the ladder gave way beneath her, and she fell to the floor, 
breaking her arm. The days that followed were among the 
happiest of her life. She was installed in her Uncle Brad¬ 
ford’s room that gave out onto the sunny back garden where 
a pear tree was in bloom. There, propped up in the middle 
of the great white bed, her arm in a sling and not hurting 
too much to spoil her voluptuous sense of her own impor¬ 
tance, she seemed to herself a romantic figure, and received 
Fan with benevolent superiority, while deeply and deli¬ 
ciously she drank in with every feverish throb of her 
passionate little heart the tender devotion of the patient 
women who loved her. Her Aunt Patty slept on a cot 
beside her at night; her Aunt Minnie brought her meals 
to her on the daintiest of trays; her grandmother and her 
Aunt Beth came with their sewing to sit with her in the 
afternoon. Often when she felt herself dropping into a doze 
after lunch, before finally closing her eyes to give herself 
up to the sleep that was creeping over her so softly, she 
would for the pleasure of it open them again to look through 
her heavy eyelids at her grandmother’s head that she could 
see above the foot of the great bed outlined against the 
sunny light of the window; and she would see the little 
old lady lift a finger to her pursed lips and nod mysteriously 
smiling at Beth and glance towards the bed as much as to 
say—“The child is dropping off, we mustn’t make a sound.” 
And the child, with such a sense of security and peace as 
to convey to her in after years the memory of a heavenly 
instant, would let herself float blissfully out into the still 


Jane—Our Stranger 41 

waters of oblivion, knowing that she would surely find 
them there when she awoke. 

She was given the book, “La Vita Nuova” for her own, 
and lay in bed dreaming of a poet who would one day 
love her as Dante had loved his Beatrice. 

It was about this time that Mrs. Carpenter began work¬ 
ing out her schemes with Philibert. 

Jane was according to her own testimony subject to fits 
of such violent temper that she scarcely knew what she 
was doing. At such moments she frightened every one 
round her and herself as well. One evening stands out 
in her memory as peculiarly dreadful. The family 
were gathered in the drawing room before supper waiting 
for her, when she burst in on them, her face as white as a 
sheet, and flung herself on her Aunt Patty with the words 
—“I’ve killed a boy. Come quick. He was torturing a 
beast. He’s out in the garden lyiug quite still.” And 
shuddering from head to foot she dragged her aunt out 
after her. The boy was not dead, but lay as a matter-of- 
fact unconscious on the path near the back gate. Jane had 
knocked him down and half throttled him. There had been 
three boys shooting with sling shots at a lame cat to whose 
leg they had tied a tin can so that the wretched beast could 
not get out of range. Jane had seen them from the win¬ 
dow and had rushed to the rescue. The affair made some¬ 
thing of a stir in the town. It got into the papers. The 
boy had to be taken to a hospital. Jane’s Uncle Bradford 
needed all his influence to avert a public scandal. Unfor¬ 
tunately it was not the first case of Jane’s violence that had 
come to the knowledge of the neighbours. People talked 
of her as “that savage girl of Izzy’s” and told their children 
they were not to play with her any more. She was taken 
out of school for a time. 

It is difficult to get at the exact meaning of this story. 
All that I know is what Jane has told me herself, and she 
may have exaggerated its social importance. At any rate, 
to her own mind it was an immense and horrible disgrace. 


42 Jane—Our Stranger 

She felt herself a monstrosity, and for weeks could not 
bear to go into the street. Her Aunt Patience too, had 
taken a very serious view of the affair. She sent for Jane 
to come to her in her study the next morning; the child 
was, I suppose, too nervous and shaken that night to listen 
to anything in the way of reprimand, and Aunt Patience 
showed her a riding whip on a peg in the corner against the 
wall. It was a cowboy quirt, a braided leather thing with a 
long lash. 

“Jane,” said her Aunt Patty, “that quirt belonged to 
your father. He left it here once long ago. It is yours. 
I have put it there on that peg for you. I am giving it to 
you for a special purpose. When a dreadful act is com¬ 
mitted against a human being, some one has to suffer, to 
make things equal. Usually the one who does the evil 
deed is punished, but I can’t, Jane, punish you like that.” 
And here Aunt Patty’s stern voice quavered. “I can’t be¬ 
cause I can’t bear to. You are my child. I love you too 
much. I have lain awake all night thinking about it. When 
God is angry he punishes people he loves. He has the right. 
He is wise and perfect. But I am not in the place of God to 
you, and I can’t do it. I am going to do something quite dif¬ 
ferent. I am going to do it because something has got 
to be done, some one has got to suffer for what you have 
done. You are to take that whip down now from that 
peg and give me three lashes with it across my shoulders. 
I am going to take your punishment on me because I think 
that will make you understand. Do as I say.” 

The child was terrified. In a kind of trance she took 
the leather weapon in her shaking hands. Her aunt stood 
straight and still in the middle of the room. “Do what I 
say, Jane,” she commanded again. Her voice was awful. 
Jane advanced a step towards her as if hypnotized, looked 
a long moment at the stern face, then suddenly collapsed in 
a heap at those large plain feet in their worn flat slippers. 

“I can’t, Aunt Patty,” she whispered, “I can’t! It’s 
enough. It’s enough.” 

After this Jane spent more and more time in her aunt’s 


Jane—Our Stranger 43 

company. The dreadful experience drew them even closer 
together. Jane would almost always accompany her aunt 
on her long tramps into the country, and although as Pa¬ 
tience so often said she never took any real interest in the 
science of birds, she nevertheless became an adept at climb¬ 
ing trees and going through thickets, and learned to imitate 
the songs of birds in an astonishing way. This accomplish¬ 
ment indeed, she never lost; even when she had long since 
forgotten all she learned about Baltimore Orioles and Brown 
Thrushes and Scarlet Tanagers and the migrations of birds 
in the spring time, and their marvellous intricate manner 
of fabricating their nests, she could throw back her head 
and fill the room wherever she might be with the most 
bewildering joyous riot of warblings and twitterings and 
liquid trills. She became so expert at this that sometimes 
she would play pranks on her aunt, and climbing into the 
tree outside the study window, she would imitate the song of 
some little feathered creature so perfectly that her Aunt 
Patty would leave her work and tip-toe softly to the window 
only to be greeted with a squeal of triumphant laughter. 

The classes in bird lore that were held in the parlour 
were for Jane little more than a chance of giggling with 
Fan in a corner. The lectures indoors went on during the 
winter, but in the spring and early summer Miss Forbes 
took her followers by train to a village on the edge of the 
forest, and there, in the leafy fastnesses of those sunny 
enclosed spaces would give her pupils demonstrated lec¬ 
tures. Jane has told me that when following the sound of 
a bird’s note heard overhead at a distance, her aunt’s face 
would become transfigured; a little mystic smile would come 
over her plain features; she would sign to her throng to 
make not the slightest noise, and silently her head bent side¬ 
ways and upwards, she would lead the way, stopping now 
and then, her finger on her lips, to listen for the clear note 
that guided her, until at last she would catch sight of her 
beauty, high up on a swaying leafy bough, and all her being 
would strain upward towards that tiny creature, and her 


44 Jane—Our Stranger 

face would light up with even a brighter joy, and she would 
point a gaunt finger mutely at the object of her worship 
as if calling attention to some lovely little celestial being. 
Then if some one, as was always the case, made a sound 
and the bird flew away, a shadow would fall on her face, 
her pose would relax and she would turn to the heavy 
human beings about her, a dull disappointed glance, looking 
at them all for a moment in deep reproach before she re¬ 
collected what she was there for, and began to tell them 
of the habits and customs of the songster who had just 
disappeared over the treetops. 

On one occasion Fan went so far as to say these rambles 
were ridiculous, and Jane flared up at once. 

“My Aunt Patty ridiculous?” she cried out. “How dare 
you? She’s the greatest ornithologist in the world, and I 
love her, I love her more than all the outside world to¬ 
gether and everything in it.” 

When Jane was fifteen her grandmother died, and a year 
later her Aunt Beth was married, and Jane, who was six¬ 
teen, had a white organdie bridesmaid’s dress and carried 
a bouquet of pink roses, and after that Aunt Minnie went 
away to be a Christian Science healer in New York, and 
Jane was left alone in the Grey House with her Aunt Patty. 

Her grandmother’s death left her with no impression of 
horror. The little old lady had gone to sleep one day quietly 
in her accustomed place by the window and had not wakened 
again, that was all. Aunt Patty at the funeral in a long 
black veil, looked like some grand and austere monument of 
grief, reminding her vaguely of a statue she had seen some¬ 
where of emblematic and national importance, but she made 
no fuss over her sorrow, and told the child that night of her 
own mother’s imminent arrival from Paris. 

This was a piece of news sufficiently wonderful to offset 
completely the effect of death in the house. Jane said to 
herself, “She is coming to take me away to be with her at 
last.” And she went up and hid in her room so that her 
Aunt Patty should not see how excited she was. 


Jane—Our Stranger 45 

But Jane was mistaken. Such was not Mrs. Carpenter's 
intention. She had come to America on receiving her sis¬ 
ter’s telegram partly out of deference to her mother’s mem¬ 
ory, partly to consult her lawyers, and partly for the 
purpose of putting Jane in a fashionable American board¬ 
ing school. The sadness in Jane’s memory long connected 
with those days has little to do with her grandmother’s 
funeral, but is the lasting indelible impression of the dis¬ 
covery she made then, that her mother did not like her. 

Mrs. Carpenter came out with her ideas for her daughter 
abruptly on the evening of her arrival. She had no idea 
that her daughter adored her. Jane’s letters beginning 
“My darling Mummy” and ending “Your loving daughter” 
had conveyed to her nothing of the writer’s emotion. No 
doubt they bored her, and no doubt she supposed that they 
bored the child who was obliged to write them. It would 
probably have seemed to her incredible that a little girl 
who scarcely ever saw her should go on wanting her for 
ten years from a distance of a couple of thousand miles. 
If she justified herself to herself at all, I suppose she made 
use of this argument: “Well, if I don’t care for her be¬ 
cause she is so dreadfully her father’s daughter, then that 
proves that I am too different for her ever to care for me. 
The best thing for us both is to leave her with people who 
won’t let her get on their nerves as she would on mine.” 

Mrs. Carpenter was not subtle, and she hated wasting 
time, so she opened the subject at once sitting with Patience 
in the back parlour, her slim silk-stockinged legs crossed 
easily, one smart foot dangling, her modish head tilted 
back above the trim cravat of black crepe and white tulle 
that her French maid had fabricated for her during the 
crossing, and a jewelled hand playing with Jane’s long pig¬ 
tail. Her sister Patience sat opposite her at her table, her 
head in her hands, her bony fingers poked up among her 
meagre locks, and Jane took in that evening with a kind 
of anguish of loyalty the contrast between the two women. 
It seemed to her somehow very pitiful that her Aunt Patty 


46 Jane—Our Stranger 

should be so ugly when her mother was so beautiful. With 
a childish absence of any vestige of a sense of humour, she 
felt at one moment ashamed for her aunt and almost angry 
with her mother, and then ashamed for her mother and 
angry with her aunt. 

“I wanted to tell you, Patty, that I think it would be a 
good thing now for this big gawk of a girl to go to a finish¬ 
ing school in New York. You’ll probably be giving up 
this house soon, and I don’t want her with me yet awhile. ’ 

Jane in talking to me of this moment said that she felt 
as if her mother’s hand that was playing affectionately with 
her hair an instant before had suddenly picked up a ham¬ 
mer and hit her on the head. For an interval everything 
was blurred and dark in the room, with sparks that seemed 
to be shooting out of her brain. It was her Aunt Patty’s 
face that brought her back to her senses. It was a suffer¬ 
ing, angry face, and presently she heard Patience say I 
am not going to give up this house, but I think you ought 
to take Jane to live with you. She wants to go, and she’s 
right. You are her mother.” 

But Izzy paid no attention to her older sister. 

“That’s nonsense! Paris is no place for a girl of her 
age. What in the world should I do with her? She’d 
be dreadfully in the way. Besides she must learn how to 
walk and manage her hands before I show her to people.” 

The thing was done. Jane knew. She knew that her 
mother did not like her and never had liked her, and she 
knew somehow that her mother did not like her because 
she was ugly and reminded her of her father Silas Carpen¬ 
ter. She knew too that her Aunt Patty had always known 
this, and that her aunt loved her as her mother never would 
love her, and that the mottled flush on her grim face was 
due in part to anger and in part to the fear of losing her. 
She understood that her aunt had determined to help her to 
attain her heart’s desire, even at the price of losing herself 
the one thing more precious to her than anything in the world. 
She dared not look at her mother and she could not speak, 


Jane—Our Stranger 47 

and still she waited though incapable now of taking in the 
meaning of their voices. She heard vaguely her aunt saying 
something about making enough money by her lectures and 
publications to keep the house going, but paid no attention. A 
question addressed directly to herself by her mother at last 
roused her. 

“Well, Jane, what do you say? Would you rather stay 
here alone with your Aunt Patty than go to boarding school 
with a lot of jolly girls of your own age?” 

She did not hesitate then for an answer. 

“Oh yes, if you can’t have me let me stay here,” and 
turning she cried, “Keep me, Aunt Patty, keep me,” and 
flung herself into those long trembling arms. 

Mrs. Carpenter seems to have been mildly amused by 
this display of affection. With her face buried in the black 
woollen stuff of her aunt’s blouse, Jane heard her say— 

“Well then, I leave it to you two. You can carry on as 
you like for the next two or three years. When you are 
eighteen, Jane, you will make your debut in Paris society. 
You’ll want to bring Patty with you, I suppose, when the 
time comes.” 

Mrs. Carpenter left three days later. The subject of 
Jane’s future was not broached again in her presence, but 
she heard the two women talking about professors of French 
and ’Italian and dancing classes, and the advantages of a 
saddle-horse and a pony cart. Her mother’s last words to 
her were— 

“Now make the most of your time and don’t run about 
all over the country in the sun. Your complexion is the 
best thing about you.” And yet she didn’t hate her mother. 
Her idea of her mother had not even undergone for her 
any fundamental change. It was all the other way round. 
It was her opinion of herself that had suffered. With the 
dogged loyalty that seemed at times positively a sign of 
stupidity and was to influence every important decision of 
her life, she defended her mother to her own heart. If her 
mother did not like her it was because she was not likeable, 


48 Jane—Our Stranger 

because her father had been a dreadful man and had handed 
down to her some secret dangerous element of his own 
nature that made her antagonistic and unpleasant to brilliant 
happy people. Her Aunt Patty loved her because she was 
sorry for her. Her Aunt Patty was different from her 
mother. She, too, was ugly and a little queer; that was the 
bond between them. Poor Patience Forbes! Jane was to 
do her justice later, but for the moment she almost hated 
the sympathy between them, while her mother’s image like 
some magic adamant statue possessing a supernatural in¬ 
violability remained for her persistently and brilliantly the 
same. And when she was gone the question Jane put her 
aunt represented the result of hours of heart-broken weep¬ 
ing in which no whisper of a reproach had mingled. 

“Aunt Patty,” she said, “how can I make my mother 
love me?” and her Aunt Patty had replied rather grimly— 

“By trying to be what she wants you to be, I suppose.” 

It was after this that Jane began sleeping at night with 
a strip of adhesive plaster across her mouth from her chin 
to her upper lip. Her aunt must have known but she did 
not interfere. I can imagine her standing over her niece’s 
bed when she came up from her protracted studies in the 
library, with a lamp in her hand, a tall grizzled figure in 
long ungainly black clothes, looking down at that sleeping 
face with the court-plaster pasted across the mouth, and I 
can see her weather-beaten face twist and tears well up in 
those shrewd intelligent eyes, and I seem to hear her ut¬ 
ter—“Poor Jane, my poor lamb. If you could only take 
some interest in science. I don’t know what is to become 
of you.” 


V 


1 BEGIN to feel uncertain in telling this story. I am 
not at all sure that I have a just feeling for that 
American life of Jane’s. I have put down the facts 
as she told them to me and have described the people there 
as they came into being for me, from her talk, but how 
am I to know that they were really like that ? Perhaps had 
I seen them with my own eyes I should have found them 
quite different: narrow, dull people with shrill twanging 
voices and queer American mannerisms. It may be that 
they would have bored me as they bored Mrs. Carpenter. 
St. Mary’s Plains I have seen for myself, but what did 
I see ? A railway station, a few streets, a deep wide muddy 
river flowing by full of ships and barges. The town ex¬ 
pressed nothing to me. It remained enigmatic. Of the 
hidden life going on in all those houses I knew nothing. 
I did not even understand what I saw. There were bill¬ 
boards all about the railway station advertising American 
products. Enormous nigger babies three times life-size 
stared from wooden fences. The Gold Dust Twins? 
Why gold dust, why twins, why nigger babies ? How 
should I know? There were other garish things: I seem 
to remember flags and red, white and blue streamers fes¬ 
tooning telegraph poles, in celebration I suppose of some 
national holiday. It was all too foreign. I could not trans¬ 
late it to myself. It made me feel very tired, and now this 
effort to recreate the atmosphere makes me weary. It is 
such a strain for the imagination. I know that my picture is 
incomplete and therefore false. I have touched on the 
gentleness and good breeding of Jane’s people, on the quiet 
of their God-fearing lives, but that word God-fearing: it is 

49 


50 Jane—Our Stranger 

strange; it suggests something stern and uncompromising 
that is very different from anything we know in Paris. It 
suggests a great seriousness, a bare nakedness before the 
mystery of the unknown, a challenge of fate and an exalta¬ 
tion, of virtue. It affects me like a bleak wind. I turn away 
from it with relief. I look out of my window with a sigh. 
There is the good Abbe coming out of the convent gate. 
He has been hearing confessions; he has been taking away 
the sins from burdened hearts and tying them up into neat 
little bundles to be dropped into the Seine. God bless him, 
and thank God for our wise old priesthood and our wonder¬ 
ful beautiful old compromises, and thank God again for the 
jaunty swing of that black cassock. Ugh! I feel better. 
The little street is dim this morning. It has been raining. 
Dear, weary little old street— 

There is no room here for American Puritanism. Paris 
is too old, too wise to harbour such things. Was it that 
that haunted Jane? Did she always see herself measured 
up to a fixed fine standard like a flagpole, the flagpole of 
American idealism, with a banner floating over her head, 
casting a shadow, purity, honesty, fear of God, written on 
it in shining letters? Payment, atonement, the wages of 
sin is death—old Mrs. Forbes reading out the words, be¬ 
lieving but not worrying, but Jane making them terribly 
personal, questioning, puzzling, burying them in her mind. 
Heaven and hell; realities! Our actions leading us toward 
one or the other. Patience Forbes saying one had to suffer 
for a bad deed. The mystery about Jane’s father—some¬ 
thing curious about his death. He was an unhappy man, 
his silence, she remembered it, she remembered him. She 
knew she was like him in some inexplicable way that fright¬ 
ened her. A world of stern simple values, all smoothed 
over for her by the gentleness and kindness of those peo¬ 
ple, the Forbes. Of course they were gentle and kind. 
They loved her. It was all right as long as she had them, 
but it was a curious preparation for life with Izzy in 
Paris. 


Jane—Our Stranger 51 

Izzy sent for Philibert on her return from America. She 
must have talked to him about Jane. They must have had 
a curious conversation. I am certain that it was then that 
they elaborated their plan. The scheme was one of grand 
proportions. They became partners in a great enterprise. 
Mrs. Carpenter was to supply her daughter, who had enough 
money to realize even! Philibert’s dreams, and he was to sup¬ 
ply the required knowledge, as well as the billet d’entree 
into the social arena of Europe. These two suited each 
other perfectly. They knew what they wanted and each 
saw in the other the means of getting it. Broadly speaking 
they wanted the same thing, and if Philibert’s conception of 
their common destiny was utterly beyond her that was just 
what made her faith in him perfect. Audacious in her 
way, his audacity far outdid hers: whatever her idea his 
was always much grander; he made her feel beautifully 
humble by brushing away some of her most cherished hopes 
as unworthy of their attention. 

“A palace in Venice?” I seem to hear him say, perched 
on one of her little straight gilt chairs, nursing his foot 
that was tucked under his knee. “But every one has palaces 
in Venice. Why not a Venetian palace in Paris, the Doge’s 
Palace itself, reproduced stone for stone, if that takes your 
fancy?” 

And she would catch her breath with the beauty of the 
idea. Not that Philibert ever intended to do anything so 
silly as spoil a site in Paris by such a freak of humour. 
He was a farceur if you like, but he had too much taste 
for that. He intended having his palace, and it was to be 
of such supreme beauty as to draw pilgrims from all over 
the world, but it was to be in harmony with its surround¬ 
ings. The allusion to the House of the Doges was just his 
little happy joke. He was very cheerful in those days. 
People used to say—“Fifi does have luck. Look at him. 
Who is it now that adores him ? Was ever a man so blatantly 
successful in his love affairs?” I must say he did have the 
look of being happily in love. His smooth cheeks were pink, 


52 Jane—Our Stranger 

his eyes, usually as expressionless as bits of blue enamel, were 
suffused with light, and the soft flaxen fuzz that grew round 
the bald spot on his head like the down on a little yellow 
gosling, seemed to send off electricity. Never in all his 
immaculate dandyism had he been so immaculate, his linen 
was superlative and the shine on his little pointed boots was 
visible halfway down the street. There was a giddy swing 
to his hurrying coat-tails, and he carried his shoulders su¬ 
perbly. Almost, but not quite, he achieved the look of being 
taller. And his contempt for the rest of us was of course 
greater than ever. Born with a gnawing consciousness of 
his own genius, he had for years been as exasperated as a 
Michael Angelo or a Paul Veronese forced by lack of space 
and a sufficiency of paints to spend his time doing little 
water-colour sketches: but he now saw himself on the way 
to realizing his inspirations in all their splendid amplitude, 
and of displaying before the eyes of men the finished gi¬ 
gantic masterpiece of his art. For Philibert was an artist: 
even Ludovic and Felix and Clementine recognized that. 
He was an artist in life on a grand scale. He dealt with 
men and women and clothes and string orchestras and food 
and polished floors and marble staircases as a painter deals 
with the colours on his palette, or perhaps more exactly as 
the theatrical producer deals with stage properties. His 
stage was the world itself; he produced his plays and his 
pageants and his tableaux vivants in the midst of the activi¬ 
ties of society, and his actors, reversing the method of our 
modern stage where the players come down across the foot¬ 
lights to mingle with the audience, were selected by him 
from the general public without their knowing it, and found 
themselves playing a part in a scene he had created round 
them and for them as if by magic. Audacious? Ah, but 
who could be more so? Who but Fifi would have had the 
impertinence to take a real live king and make him, all un¬ 
conscious, play the principal part in a pantomime before a 
handful of spectators? Mrs. Carpenter had dreamed of 
entertaining kings. Philibert entertained them, but he did 


Jane—Our Stranger 53 

something much more extraordinary; he put them into his 
play and made them entertain him. 

Who in Paris will ever forget the night he threw open 
his door for the Czar of all the Russias? Who does not 
remember how he stage-managed the crowd outside, how 
troops of singers from the Opera mingled with the mob far 
down the street and sang hymns of acclamation as the royal 
guest approached his fairy palace, so illumined as to shine 
like a single rosy jewel? And the golden carpet thrown 
down on the marble stairs, and Jane standing alone at the 
top of that fantastic staircase, like an emerald column, her 
train arranged by Philibert’s own clever hands sweeping 
down the steps beneath her to add supernaturally to her 
height, her strange face under its diadem of jewels looking 
as small in the distance as the carved image cut out of a 
coin. Do people not talk even now of that night, and allude 
to Philibert as the last of‘the benevolent despots? “He was 
unique,” you can still hear them say it, “there will never be 
any one like him. No one can amuse the world as he did.” 
And no one ever will. The War has changed all that. 
Francois I. was his father; the Medici were his forerunners; 
he was the last of his kind. 

But he refined on this sensational achievement. He went 
farther. Only a few realized quite how far he did go. In 
his most brilliant days, I was on the point of saying during 
the most brilliant period of his reign, he played plays at 
which he himself was the sole spectator. I remember the 
occasion when a certain popular Prince, heir at that time to 
one of the most solid thrones in Europe, expressed a desire 
to come and shoot at the Chateau de Ste. Clothilde. Mrs. 
Carpenter had been all of a tremble with pleasure. It was 
the first royal visitor to sleep under his roof. Philibert had 
restored our old place in the country, and had in five years 
managed by a miracle to have there the best partridge 
shooting in France. “You will have a large party for His 
Royal Highness, I suppose?” Mrs. Carpenter had ventured 
timidly. How humble and self-effacing she had grown by 


54 Jane—Our Stranger 

that time, poor thing. “Not at all,” replied Philibert. 
“There will be no women and not more than six guns.” 
And he added then with a sublime simplicity unequalled, I 
believe, by any monarch or any court jester in history, 
“When royalty comes to Ste. Clothilde for the shooting, 
there is another place laid at table, that is all.” 

Poor Izzy, she was completely at a loss. No longer could 
she attempt to follow him. It was Jane who understood. 
She looked at him curiously through her gleaming half- 
closed eyes; I remember the look, while she breathed in a 
whisper—“Take care, you will have nothing left to live for.” 
I remember the tone of that remark. 

But I am anticipating too much. I meant to speak here 
merely of his matrimonial expectations. These hopes gave 
his person an added lustre and his fine family nose an ac¬ 
centuated sneer. Nevertheless he kept them secret: no one 
knew that Mrs. Carpenter even had a daughter. She never 
mentioned her to any of us. On the other hand she never 
mentioned Philibert in her letters to Jane. It was part of 
the scheme. They had worked it out completely between 
them to its smallest details. Jane would be dangerously in¬ 
dependent. She would be in no way answerable to her 
mother for all that immense lot of money. It was best then 
that she should suspect nothing. She would arrive, the 
Marquis de Joigny would be presented to her and would 
fall in love with her at first sight. Her mother would leave 
her free to choose for herself. Philibert made himself re¬ 
sponsible for the rest. 

And, in the meantime, while these two master minds were 
at work, Jane still waited in the Grey House for her mother 
to come and fetch her, waited a*s the appointed time drew 
near with little of the old exultant expectancy, but instead 
with nervous misgiving. She was afraid of not pleasing her 
mother, she was in an agony at the thought of leaving her 
Aunt Patience. 

And I find myself now, as I sit here, painfully counting 
with suspended breath the last days of Jane’s girlhood in 


Jane—Our Stranger 55 

St. Mary’s Plains. I see them silently slipping by over her 
unconscious head as she sat in the back garden among her 
Aunt Patty’s hollyhocks, or walked with her French govern¬ 
ess along the homely streets, swinging her school books by 
a strap, humming a tune under her breath, her neat modest 
clothes swinging to the rhythm of her beautiful young body, 
her strange little ugly ardent face lifted to the sweet air in 
frank animal enjoyment. Patience Forbes stands on the 
front stoop between the two wooden pillars waiting for her 
to come running up the path, waiting for the generous clasp 
of those strong young arms, waiting to feel once more the 
contact of all that pure vital youthfulness, and I hear as they 
sit down to supper opposite each other, with the tall candles 
lighted on the old mahogany table and the hot muffins 
steaming under the folded white napkin, the sound of the 
grandfather clock in the hall, ticking out the last precious 
fleeting moments of their time together. 

This is very painful, I will not linger over it. I bring 
myself back, I falter, what then am I to think of? Where 
turn my attention? So much is ugly. Ah, but Jane, why 
go any further? Is it not enough? Is it not clear to you 
as it is to me? Is there any need to say more? Was it 
not all just as I say? Now that you are back there at last 
alone, now that we have lost you for ever, now that you 
have gone, irresistibly drawn out of your splendour to the 
little shabby place you loved, what is there to torment you? 
Philibert, Bianca? What have they to do with you now? 
They hated you. How can you be beholden to people who 
did you nothing but harm? But Jane, the’re were some of 
us who adored you, and if you had told us everything, as 
you at last told me, we would have loved you only the more. 

I sometimes wonder whether Mrs. Carpenter ever sus¬ 
pected what a narrow shave she had towards the end, and 
how all her plans very nearly came to nothing at the moment 
of their fruition because of Bianca. It is probable that she 
had little more idea of the danger than a vague uneasy sus- 


56 Jane—Our Stranger 

picion that Philibert for a time was distraught by some in¬ 
fluence whose source she ignored. She had met Bianca but 
did not connect her with Philibert; knowing almost nothing 
in those days of what she would have called Philibert’s 
family life. There was no one to tell her that Philibert had 
once wanted to marry Bianca and that old Frangois had re¬ 
fused him as a suitor for his daughter’s hand because of his 
lack of fortune. Izzy knew nothing about the strange inti¬ 
macy of these two. How should she? Philibert was not 
likely to tell her and certainly none of the rest of us were 
in the habit of discussing with her the private affairs of our 
families. My mother knew of course; she doted on Bianca, 
and Claire, and all the family. They had all desired the 
match. Bianca was a pearl that they collectively coveted, 
and when things went wrong they had all been annoyed with 
the old rake her father. Aunt Clothilde had gone so far as 
to rap him over the knuckles with her fan one day when he 
took her out to dinner, and to say in her best rude manner 
—‘'You’ve done a pretty thing, spoiling the lives of those 
two children. And what’s Bianca got from her mother? 
Five hundred thousand francs a year. Just so, and you will 
leave her the same when you die, which will be before long 
at the pace you are going. And Philibert has nothing but 
his debts, but then, who knows, I might have given him 
something. I’m not so in love with him as some, but still 
he’s my nephew, and the two of them were made for each 
other. Now you’ll see, they’ll both turn out badly.” But 
Frangois only laughed as if he were enjoying a wicked joke 
that he was not going to share with her. He was always 
like that, chuckling to himself in a sly sort of way that made 
you creep and roused the curiosity of women. Sometimes 
he would stare at me with his pale, red-rimmed, half-closed 
eyes and that smile on his face as if my deformity was very 
amusing. I hated him. I could have told them what kind 
of a father he was to Bianca. 

In any case she was married a year later to her well-to-do 
nonentity, and we all went to the wedding, and Aunt Clo, 


Jane—Our Stranger 57 

being a near relative, walked in the cortege with Francois 
and made faces behind her prayer book. But Philibert was 
white as a sheet and kicked a wretched dog out of the way 
as he came down the church steps with such violence that he 
broke its paw. Bianca was, I remember, as lovely and serene 
as a lily. She didn’t speak to Philibert at all the day she 
was married. She just kept him standing there near her, 
not too near, during the reception, as if he belonged to her, 
as if he were a flunkey of some sort, and never once so 
much as looked at him. But she spoke to me. She asked 
me why I had not proposed for her hand. “I might have 
accepted you, you know” she said in that small reedy pene- 
tratingly sweet voice of hers—“just to spite them all,”—and 
there wasn’t a trace of a smile on her clear curving lips. 
Devil—she meant it for Philibert, of course, and of course 
he heard. 

My mother used to say that Bianca reminded her of a very 
young Sir Galahad. Claire suggested half-mockingly St. 
Sebastian. I thought she was like a fox, quick and cruel 
with a poisonous bite. As a matter of fact, in those days 
she looked a harmless little thing. Her small snow-white 
square face was sweetly modelled and framed as it was by a 
cap of short black hair that was cut a la Jeanne d’Arc, it had 
the look of a mediaeval Italian angel. Only her enormous 
eyes very blue and deep and her voice gave her away. If 
one watched closely one caught glimpses in those eyes of the 
invisible monster locked up in that light smooth body; if 
one listened to her voice one heard it. She seemed to know 
this, and much of the time she kept her eyes lowered. Cool 
and aloof and monosyllabic she hid herself, her real self, 
calculating her power and economical of it, deceptive, waiting 
till it should be worth her while to disengage the magic that 
lurked in the smooth complexity of her little person. Her 
voice was not a pure single note, but a double reedy sound 
that had a penetrating harmony. One remembered it with 
a haunting exasperation. It was rather high in pitch, and 
the words it carried did not punctuate the sound of it, but 


58 Jane—Our Stranger 

seemed to be strung like beads on a sustained vibrating 
chord as if on some double coppery wire. Each word was 
distinct and beautifully enunciated by her lips without inter¬ 
fering with the sound that flowed through them. There was 
nothing guttural or emotional about Bianca’s voice, but it 
was disturbing; it irritated and seemed to correspond to 
some secret nerve-centre of pleasure in the listener’s brain. 

I have watched her sometimes using her voice for special 
purposes of her own, but for the most part in company she 
tried to subdue it, and would often stop herself in the 
middle of one of her rapid speeches with a little annoyed 
laugh. She would then look down and move away, but even 
her floating stiffly off like a rigid little broomstick with a 
pair of wings or wheels on the end of it had a strange 
charm. 

Her gestures were very restrained. She had a way of 
holding attention so closely when apparently doing nothing, 
that when she did make the slightest movement it conveyed 
exactly what she intended it to convey. 

Philibert was a connoisseur fit to appreciate her, and she 
knew it. They had in their precocious youth recognized 
each in the other a rare complementary quality, but even in 
the days when Bianca with abbreviated skirts had let me 
make love to her, the affinity between Philibert and herself 
had made her hate him. It was a curious attraction I 
thought that made them constantly want to hurt each other. 
I knew well enough- that Bianca was only sweet to me in 
order to make Philibert angry. Sometimes in the garden 
of our house, where we played while Frangois paid his re¬ 
spects of my mother, she would kiss me, looking sideways 
at Philibert all the time, and he would pirouette on one toe 
and pretend not to care, and would yell with laughter at me 
and call out—“Don’t think she loves you. You’re crooked. 
You will never be any better. You can’t do this. Look at 
me. She loves me.” And Bianca would turn away from 
us and look at him as he told her to, and say to him—“I 
don’t like you at all,” and then stalk away into the drawing 


Jane—Our Stranger 59 

room where she would wheedle from her father a succession 
of lumps of sugar soaked in cognac, and if we followed we 
would find her rubbing her smooth little cheek up and down 
against Frangois whiskers and making little gurgling noises 
of pleasure. Frangois was certainly a queer kind of father. 
Philibert and I could have told tales about that.— If it had 
only been lumps of sugar dipped in brandy—. We took 
note with a kind of shocked envy. Once she took us down 
to the pantry and showed us a bottle of “Triple Sec.” 
“That’s the nicest,” she said, “it’s like honey fire.” 

When she was ten fge turned her loose in his library, or 
at any rate finding her there with some dreadful book in her 
lap, only laughed. Every one knows what that library con¬ 
tained. Rare editions, old bindings, a priceless collection; 
bibliophiles came from far to finger those volumes. 
Frangois was a discriminating collector. But for Bianca— 
no one discriminated for her. One can see her like a little 
greedy white lamb browsing in the poisonous herbage of that 
held of knowledge. She began with the memoirs of Casan¬ 
ova. She had picked it out because it was by an Italian. 
She was always dreaming aljout Italy, her mother’s country. 
Her mother had died while she was a baby, but Bianca 
seemed to remember her. She often spoke about her, and 
every Friday went with her governess to light a candle in 
St. Sulpice for the repose of her spirit. As for her literary 
discoveries, Philibert alone was aware of what she was up 
to, and even he didn’t know much about it. Occasionally 
she would drop a hint, or lend a book. She would never 
have admitted even to him that she read all the books she 
did read. She understood Philibert perfectly. As she grew 
older she allowed him to suspect that she was wise, but not 
too wise. She was willing to be for him an object of mysti¬ 
fication, but never of vulgar curiosity. Gradually she grew 
conscious of a purpose in regard to Philibert, and I believe 
that this purpose had something to do with her refusing to 
marry him. For, after all, she could have brought her father 
round had she tried to. No, it was not her idea to marry 


6o Jane—Our Stranger 

the man she liked. Her idea was far more amusing than 
that. 

What happened just before Jane’s arrival in Paris was 
simple enough. Bianca had been married two years. She 
had been to Italy and had come back to find Philibert thick 
as thieves with a great grey-headed American, and she had 
asked herself what this meant. It didn’t take her long to 
find out. She had a way of knowing what he was up to. 
Probably he told her outright, and she was not pleased. For 
the moment she did not like the idea of Philibert’s marrying 
any one, least of all a colossal American fortune. She was 
far too clever to make a scene. She had other means of 
getting her own way, and now out of caprice she exerted 
them. I imagine her opening her monstrous eyes just a 
little wider than usual and allowing Philibert to look into 
them. I can see her move ever so slightly with a small 
jerk of the hips and upward undulation of her slim body, 
and I watch her lean forward to allow the faint suggestion 
of that magic essence of hers to disengage itself from her 
person, through her lifted eyelids, through her sweet parted 
lips, through the tips of her long delicate fingers, and I see 
Philibert falter in his talk about the American girl, and 
silently watch her, and get to his feet like a man in a dream 
and come close but not too close. For a fortnight she kept 
him like that, in a trance; everywhere he followed her. 

Mrs. Carpenter lost him. It was during the month of 
May. Bianca went about a good deal that Spring and was 
very much admired. It was at a big afternoon affair that 
I saw her, standing with Philibert looking out at the crowded 
gardens. She was very young still; she was nothing more 
than a very thin slip of a thing with pretty little sticks of 
legs and a pair of long delicate arms hanging close to her 
sides, the fingers pressed against the folds of her slinky 
muslin frock. She stood very still and rather stiff, her heels 
together and her lovely head just tilted very slightly away 
from Philibert as if she had drawn it back quickly and 
gently at the sound of a disturbing murmur, or as if perhaps 


Jane—Our Stranger 6i 

she were enticing that murmur, as yet unuttered, from his 
lips. I watched them. They did not look at each other. 
Their eyes traced parallel lines of vision before them over the 
heads of the crowd. Nothing betrayed their deep commun¬ 
ion save this common stillness. I did not hear them speak 
or see their lips move, but I know that Philibert was speak¬ 
ing; I learnt afterwards what it was he was saying. 

He was asking her to bolt with him. 

It was the moment of supreme danger for Izzy Carpenter. 
The marvellous edifice she had so carefully fashioned with 
Philibert hung suspended by a thread. Like some great 
gorgeous glittering chandelier with a thousand candles 
hoisted into the air by Bianca’s little finger, it hung there 
swaying in .space, held up to the ceiling of heaven by the 
thread of her hesitation. Philibert, his hands behind him 
holding his top hat and gloves against the neat back of his 
morning coat, watched it. Through closed teeth he had 
spoken without looking at his companion and now he waited 
in silence. If she assented the whole thing would be dashed 
to the ground in a million pieces. He took in all that it 
meant for him. Like one of those drunkards whose facul¬ 
ties are most keen when they are under the influence of 
liquor, he saw with excruciating clearness, through the super¬ 
lative excitation of Bianca’s fascination that was working 
upon him, the beauty and magnitude of the thing he was 
sacrificing. And yet if she had said it, the word he awaited, 
he would have turned away from all that debris with a sneer, 
so perfectly had Bianca made him feel that she was worth 
it, worth anything, worth more than even he, with his for¬ 
midable imagination could conceive of. 

She didn’t say it. She didn’t say anything. She merely 
lowered her head after an instant’s utter stillness and floated 
away from him. I wonder if there was the slightest of 
smiles on her lovely averted lips. Perhaps not. Her smile 
was deep down in the well of her abysmal being. She had 
had an inspiration. She had thought of something much 
more amusing than what he proposed. She would reveal it 


62 Jane—Our Stranger 

to him later; there was plenty of time. Or perhaps she 
would never reveal it to him at all, but just make him do 
as she wished without letting him know that she had thought 
of it long before. In any case she would leave him alone 
now. 

And so Mrs. Carpenter was saved and went to America 
to fetch Jane. 


VI 


P HILIBERT had given himself a month in which to 
win Jane’s hand, and it took him five. I don’t know 
why I find any comfort in this fact, but I do. I 
am glad she kept him waiting. I am glad the two con¬ 
spirators were uncomfortable, even for so short a time, 
and there is no doubt that they were uncomfortable. Jane 
paid no attention to her mother’s funny little friend, who 
wore corsets and high heels and used scent. She sized him 
up in a long grave glance that covered him from tip to toe 
and then seemed to forget about him. The truth was 
that she was absorbed in her mother. To her great delight 
she had found in that quarter an unexepected cordiality. It 
almost seemed as if her mother had decided to like her. 
She had never been half so nice. 

And she fell in love with Paris. 

Wonderful enchantress city, queen woman of cities! It 
had assumed to greet her its most charming and gentle as¬ 
pect. She arrived one evening in June. She held her 
breath as she drove across the Place de la Concorde, where 
the light was silver and blue, and up the Champs Elysees 
towards the Arc de Triomphe that stood out against the 
sunset glow like a great and lovely gate into Heaven. She 
thought, so she told me afterwards, of the magic city under 
the sea in the poem by Edgar Allen Poe. The following 
morning she was up with the milkman and had slipped out 
of the house alone before any one was awake, and had walked 
from the Avenue du Bois down to the Tuileries Gardens 
and back again as the newsvenders were taking down the 
shutters of their kiosks. They smiled at her and nodded. 
A little morning breeze laughed in the trees. A woman 

63 


64 Jane—Our Stranger 

came by wheeling a cart full of flowers. She filled her 
arms and arrived at her mother’s doorway breathless with 
pleasure. Mrs. Carpenter had the sense not to scold her, 
but she was obliged during the days that followed to engage 
a special duenna who could walk far enough and fast enough 
to keep up with her daughter. It appeared that Jane had 
read a good deal of French history. She visited churches, 
monuments and museums and made excursions to Versailles, 
la Malmaison, Fontainebleau. The Rue de la Paix amused 
her, she liked the clothes her mother bought her; but after 
a long morning at the dressmaker’s, standing to let little 
kneeling women drape silks on her young body, she would 
gulp down her lunch and start ou-t again to explore, on 
foot, refusing to take the motor. 

One day she turned into this little street. I saw her. 
I thought at first that she was a Russian, some young Cos¬ 
sack princess perhaps. Her dog, a Great Dane, walked 
beside her, his head close to her splendidly moving limbs. 
I had never seen any one walk like that. She came on, her 
head up, her arms down along her sides, and the wind, or 
was it the force of her own swift movement, made her gar¬ 
ments flow back from her. It was the Victoire de Samo- 
thrace walking through the sunlit streets of Paris. I 
watched her approach with a strange excitement. Behind 
her trotted her valiant duenna, a hurrying little woman in 
black. And as the radiant white figure came nearer I saw 
that she was very young, scarcely more than a great glori¬ 
ous child, and her strange ugly face under her close white 
hdt shaped like a helmet seemed to me, all glowing though 
it was with health, to be half asleep. When she was gone I 
turned back to my rooms and sat with my head in my hands 
thinking of how curious it was, the regal carriage of that 
fine free controlled body, and that face that did not know 
itself. I felt oppressed and exhilarated and somehow full 
of pity. It was dangerous to be like that, so young, so 
brave, so unknowing. Yes, an ugly face, but her walk was 
the most beautiful I had ever seen. 


Jane—Our Stranger 65 

Through July Philibert made no progress with his suit. 
It was a puzzling problem for him and for Izzy. Mrs. 
Carpenter found herself the all too successful rival of the 
man she had selected for her daughter. Jane’s attitude 
was simple enough. She enjoyed everything immensely and 
felt that this was just what she had hoped to find. Her 
wonderful mother who had appeared at one time not to 
care for her was now giving her daily proofs of affection. 
And so she was happy. Mrs. Carpenter must have been 
nonplussed. The connection was obvious, for the more 
contented Jane was the less sign' did she make of wanting 
anything else. She was delighted at being with her mother s 
how could it occur to her to want to get married ? 

And Philibert’s artfulness with women was of no use to 
him here. His professional tricks were wasted. He could 
only hold her attention by telling her about the things 
she looked at; histories, anecdotes, dissertations on art and 
architecture she would listen to with profound interest. 
She kept him for hours in the galleries of the Louvre dis¬ 
coursing on the great masters, and occasionally she would 
say with a sigh while he mopped his exhausted head—“How 
much you know.” It was the only tribute he got from her. 

For August they went to Trouville. Monsieur Cornuche 
had not yet invented Deauville. The trip was very nearly 
Philibert’s undoing. He was very hard put to it, was our 
Philibert, during that month of August. And how he 
must have hated it. Nothing but sheer grit kept him going, 
nothing less than the most enormous prize would have in¬ 
duced him to put up with so much misery. 

She rode, she swam, she played tennis, she hired a yacht 
and sailed it. He was most of the time quite literally out 
of breath with running after tennis balls, carrying golf 
clubs, galloping down the sands after her vanishing figure; 
and to add to his discomfiture some of his friends, those 
whom he could not be seen with under the circumstances, 
saw him all too often and laughed behind the screen of the 
little red and white bathing tents. I enjoy in retrospect 


66 Jane—Our Stranger 

his discomfiture. Such as it was it constituted for Jane an 
unconscious revenge. For a month she kept her mother 
and Philibert on pins and needles, and I believe that if her 
mother had not been constantly at hand to dress him up 
again and again in all the trappings of romance, that 
Jane would have found him finally and irretrievably ridic¬ 
ulous, just a poor exasperated absurd little man who was 
no good at games and got blue with cold in the water. 
For of course what saved Philibert in the end was Jane’s 
desire to please her mother. 

Mrs. Carpenter was obliged to take a definite line. It 
had not been her intention to do so, but she found that she 
must if the plan were to come off at all. I don’t truly 
believe the woman was more double-faced than most. She 
would if one hauled her out of the grave to make her de¬ 
fence, put up, I suppose, a respectable argument. She 
would say that she had done what thousands of mothers do 
every day, and what all of them should do. She had 
picked out a husband whom she considered a brilliant match 
for her daughter and had married her to him. The only 
reason that obliged her to resort to subterfuge, and hers, she 
would say, was of the vaguest and slightest, was the girl’s 
complete financial independence. Her own extraordinary 
husband had given her no hold over her daughter, but had 
put everything into the hands of a trio of bumptious big¬ 
oted American citizens. What she really was doing when 
she had made her plans for Jane and then got her to fulfil 
them without knowing it, was not bamboozling the child, 
but getting the best of those horrid trustees. If it had not 
been for them and the grotesque will they kept waving in 
her face, she would have said to Jane simply, “Here, my 
darling, is the man I have chosen for you. You will be 
married in a month’s time.” But she couldn’t do that. 
She was forced to make her daughter take him of her own 
free choice, and so she would go on, briskly explaining 
that she had done it all for the best. Was it not a credita¬ 
ble desire on her part to see her child the leader of French 


Jane—Our Stranger 67 

society? And had not Jane subsequently become even more 
than that? Was there a town in America that did not 
read with envy the newspaper accounts of her triumphs? 
Did it not all come out quite as she had foreseen? If the 
two were not happy what did that prove? Just nothing at 
all beyond the tiresome truism that marriages always ended 
in making people hate each other. 

Mrs. Carpenter had adopted a jocular easy manner with 
her daughter on bringing the girl to Europe that seemed to 
express her happy sense of their being comrades and equals. 
The role she assumed was that of an elder sister who was 
ready to give any amount of good-natured advice when 
asked for, but would in no way interfere with the freedom 
of the fortunate youngster. This was Izzy’s way of being 
careful and of making it impossible for Jane ever to turn 
round and say—“It was my mother who urged me to do 
it.” Fortunately for her peace of mind Jane hid nothing 
from her and was constantly asking for guidance. 

It was Mrs. Carpenter’s habit to have her morning coffee 
in bed at nine o’clock after an hour’s massage, and to let 
Jane come and talk to her while she sipped it and ran 
through her letters. The girl would come in from an early 
ride, plunge into a cold bath, and all aglow and smelling of 
soap and youth would run to her mother’s wonderful scented 
bedroom where, draped in her dressing-gown, she would 
stretch herself out on a chaise-longue; and Izzy, under her 
lace coverlet, enjoying the sensation of her willowy figure 
rubbed down once more to smooth well-being, would en¬ 
courage Jane to talk. It was her hour for getting together 
the data that she would hand on later in the day to Phili¬ 
bert. 

Jane would say—“Our little Marquis was riding this 
morning. He joined me. His eyes looked puffy. They 
had funny little pouches under them.” And Mrs. Carpenter, 
who, with a languid finger turning the page of a letter, had 
pricked up her ears, would sigh inwardly and say aloud— 

“The poor man must be tired. He has so many demands 


68 Jane—Our Stranger 

on him.” And then secretly irritated but maintaining a 
bland countenance, she would listen to the girl telling how 
she had given her would-be suitor a lesson in riding. 

“You know, Mummy, he was really hurting that horse’s 
mouth dreadfully, and he didn’t seem to be sorry when I 
showed him. Do you think he is just a tiny bit cruel?” 

And again Izzy would reply mildly, in defense of the 
absent one—“My darling, I know him to be the kindest 
man in the world.” 

But Jane did not always by any means show interest 
in the Marquis de Joigny, and much as it annoyed Mrs. 
Carpenter to hear him criticized, it disturbed her even more 
when he was not mentioned at all for days together. Jane 
would bring with her a letter from her Aunt Patty and read 
aloud long extracts about St. Mary’s Plains and its tiresome 
doings, about Patience’s rheumatism and Patience’s bird lec¬ 
tures, and Uncle Bradford’s last new case, and the Mohican 
bank’s new building on Pawamak Street, and Aunt Beth’s 
housekeeping adventures in Seattle, until poor Izzy was bored 
to tears; or she would be full of the problems of Fan’s life 
with her Polish husband. She saw Fan much more often 
than her mother could have wished. One day she said— 
“I don’t think Fan is happy. I suppose it’s because she has 
married a Roman Catholic. It doesn’t seem to work very 
well, changing your religion.” And Izzy in alarm scribbled 
a note of warning and sent it to Philibert by a special mes¬ 
senger. She usually wrote to him on the days she couldn’t 
manage to see him. Somehow or other he must be kept 
every day, au courant. I can imagine these messages. 

“The child’s head is full of Fan and her wretched Pole, 
and the effect of religion on marriage. Don’t for anything 
touch on the subject in talk. You had better keep away 
from churches when you take her out. She is disturbed 
by Fan’s money troubles and Ivanoff’s gambling. Don’t 
for heaven’s sake go near the Casino while we are here.” 

It would be comic if it were not something else. I see 


Jane—Our Stranger 69 

my elder brother perusing these missives with fervour and 
tossing them away with exasperated petulance. 

Go near the Casino? Had he done so? Was he not the 
perfect nursemaid? 

It was Fan who told me about all this afterwards. She 
had been in Paris three years before Jane, had got herself 
brought over by some chance acquaintances who had paid 
her passage across the Atlantic, and had allowed her to bene¬ 
fit by their loose indifferent chaperonage once she got 
here. It was all she needed. In six months she had mar¬ 
ried Ivanoff and knew everybody in Paris who from her 
point of view was worth knowing. Mrs. Carpenter had 
been civil to her, but not friendly. Nevertheless it was in 
Izzy’s drawing room that she had met Ivanoff. 

Ivanoff was one of Izzy’s satellites. She was one of the 
people he lived on. He could expect to win twenty thousand 
francs from her at Bridge during a winter. Besides that 
she gave him many meals and introduced him to other 
people who could be fleeced for more substantial sums. 
We all knew Ivanoff. His title was supposed not to bear 
too much looking into, and his estates in Poland were not, 
I believe, to be found on the map of that country, but 
he was very presentable and was renowned for his success 
with women. Fan fell in love with him promptly. He 
was big, he was dark, his brown face with its mongolian 
cast of feature, slanting eyes and thick sleek black hair 
seemed to her beautiful, and she believed that he had a deep 
romantic soul. Moreover he was a prince and he was like 
wax in her hands. She could not and did not resist him. 
Her stepfather made her an allowance of twenty-five thou¬ 
sand francs a year and showed no interest in what she did 
with it. There was no one to enquire into Ivanoff s af¬ 
fairs or habits on Fan’s behalf. She was alone in the 
world and must make her own way. Life with Ivanoff 
would be a continual stream of parties; .Monte Carlo, Paris, 
Biarritz, Deauville. The prospect glittered before her. 


70 Jane—Our Stranger 

Where could she have a good time if not in these gay haunts 
of pleasure? The thought of going back to St. Mary’s 
Plains made her feel sick. 

She had been married a year or so when Jane joined 
her mother. Ivanoff was her slave. She could do any¬ 
thing with him except keep him from the gaming table. 
Her one worry was money, but she did not allow this to 
worry her much. Jane exasperated her that first summer. 
Fan felt herself much the wiser and years the older. Jane’s 
lamblike devotion to her mother “gave her fits.” And Jane 
seemed utterly indifferent to the enormous power of her 
money, she was too stupid, the way she let her mother and 
Philibert manage her. But Fan thought Philibert a great 
catch. She knew her Paris well enough to know that if 
Jane became Philibert’s wife her position would be im¬ 
mense. So she didn’t interfere, merely watched and 
laughed and thought Jane a fool not to see what Philibert 
was after. 

October saw them all in Paris and Philibert not appre¬ 
ciably nearer his goal. Jane no longer ignored him, she 
now took him for granted, which was almost worse. He 
determined to be personal. It was not easy with Jane, but 
he must risk being thought impudent. One day he asked 
her what kind of a man she wanted to marry. She hesi¬ 
tated, thinking a moment. “A hero or a friend,” she an¬ 
swered. But when he said that he hoped he was her friend 
she smiled, refusing to take him seriously. The word hero 
however, gave him his cue. He had too much sense to try 
and pose as one himself, but the thought occurred to him 
that perhaps by telling her of other heroes who had be¬ 
longed to his family and his country, some of the glamour 
of the past would touch him with a reflected brilliance for 
those candid romantic eyes. And the task was not uncon¬ 
genial to him. He had a gift for story-telling and could 
gossip endlessly about historic personages. Where history 
was meagre he could rely upon his imagination. He began 
with the lovely story of Bayard and Du Guesclin and she 


Jane—Our Stranger 71 

listened with glowing eyes as he talked of those chivalrous 
knights. He had found the key. It was easy now to hold 
her attention. There followed hours and days filled with 
legend and anecdote, tales of brave chivalry and quaint 
custom. Philippe le Bean and Jeanne la Folle, Saint Louis, 
Henri IV, Clothilde de Joigny, the saintly lady whose name 

was still honoured in the family, Monseigneur de B - 

who had had his tongue cut out during the Massacres de 
Septembre; it was a rich field, and one where he knew his 
way about, and to supplement his talk he gave her little 
books of folklore and poetry, and songs of the Troubadours, 
the poems of Ronsard, and found for her an old parchment 
copy in script of that charming anonymous ballad that be¬ 
gins “Gentils Galants de France.” 

And Jane, delighted, treated him with a new attentive 
kindness. He had gained her confidence and had touched 
her imagination, but there again his success seemed to end. 
He could get no further. It did not occur to her to ask 
why he took such pains to supply her eager mind with 
lovely legends. And so he fretted and fumed once more. 
I can imagine him wracking his brains for a solution. 
The problem would have presented itself to him with simple 
brutality. How rouse the girl’s emotions without frighten¬ 
ing her? He hit on a plan. Mrs. Carpenter took a box 
at the Opera. There under cover of the music Philibert 
whispered adroitly to romantic youth, told her on every 
note of the scale that she was young and wonderful, that 
life was full of magic mystery, that the throbbing of her 
heart was its response to the summons of love, and that 
some day a man would come to her and beg her to allow 
him to carry her up and out on the surging torrent of that 
inspiration into a heaven of pure delight. 

It worked. Under the hypnotic influence of the orchestra 
with its disturbing rhythm and moving harmonies, ravished 
by the seeming beauty of those sentimental voices, soaring, 
floating, dropping deep to caress and moan and shiver, all 
unconscious of the mediocrity, the coarseness, the bold sen- 



72 Jane—Our Stranger 

suality, her little being stirred, and her senses, waking 
slowly in their chaste prison responded to the appeal of the 
man behind her in the shadow, who took on a little the ro¬ 
mantic look of the hero on the stage. She did not know 
what was happening to her. She would come out of the 
theatre in a daze and walk silently between her mother and 
Philibert to the carriage and sink back into her corner, her 
head throbbing, and through half-closed eyelids would gaze 
with confusion and fear and vague painful pleasure at the 
tall hat and white shirt-bosom of the man facing her in the 
intimate gloom, and as though the smoothly moving car¬ 
riage were just another box for the continuation of the 
performance she would hear the same voice speaking to her 
that had mingled with all that music, and she would find 
it impossible to distinguish between her companion’s reality 
and the magic charm of the glorious fiction. 

One night when he left them at their door after an 
evening of this kind, she heard him say to her mother who 
had lingered behind— “C’etait trks reussi ce soir and give 
a little dry laugh. She did not ask herself what he meant, 
but his tone struck her ear as discordant and she remem¬ 
bered it afterwards. It was one of the things that flashed 
up out of her memory when Philibert, some years later, 
wanting once and for all to answer her questions as to why 
he had married her, told her with his incomparable lucidity 
all about the way he and her mother had used her. He put 
it to her completely then, explaining to her the details of 
their method and summing it all up with the words—‘‘At 
least half the credit was your Mamma’s. Though she did 
not seem to be doing much she was working all the same like 
a galley-slave. Of course it was not her duty to make love 
to you, but it was she who prepared your mind for the seed 
I sowed in it, and it was she who kept me informed of your 
mental progress. I say mental; you know what I mean. 
Call it anything you like, but give full credit to your charm¬ 
ing mother for what she did for you. She showed signs of 
positive genius.” 


Jane—Our Stranger 73 

Thus it was that they put their heads together, and after 
the successful experiment of the Opera evenings had run 
its course for a month, Jane’s manner began to change. 
She no longer came rollicking into the room of a morning 
like a great roystering puppy. She no longer talked so 
much or so freely, and sometimes, heavy-eyed and pale, 
as if she had not slept well, she would lie silently on her 
back staring at the ceiling, and blush crimson when asked 
what her thoughts were. These facts were reported faith¬ 
fully to Philibert of course, also the incidents of the 
morning, when Jane got up with a bound and placed herself 
abruptly before her mother’s long mirror and cried with the 
accent of despair—“Am I always to be so ugly?” 

But I imagine Mrs. Carpenter in telling Philibert did not 
finish the story. She had said to Jane—“No, my child, you 
can be considered a beauty if you want to. With that body 
your face doesn’t matter. Men will admire you, never fear; 
ip fact I know one that does already.” 

Jane at that had turned away from the glass and had 
come to the foot of her mother’s bed and had said earnestly, 
with a flood of crimson mantling her face and throat— 
“But it’s not a man’s admiration Pm thinking of, mother 
dear, it’s yours.” The child had then become speechless 
and had gulped strangely with the effort not to break down 
and had given it up and gone quickly out of the room. 

If Mrs. Carpenter was touched she did not say so, and 
she never referred to the incident in her subsequent talks 
with Jane, limiting her remarks on the girl’s appearance to 
a voluble flow of worldly advice. 

“Never go in for curls or ribbons or fluffiness. That’s 
not your style. If you must look like a Chinese mummy 
then look it even more than you do. Make the most of 
your queerness. People won’t know whether you are ugly 
or handsome, but they’ll be bound to look at you. That’s 
all that’s necessary. Anything is better than being unno¬ 
ticed. That you never will be. Nonsense, you must get 
used to being stared at. Most girls like it. Wear your 


74 Jane—Our Stranger 

hair straight back and close to your head. Never mind 
your lower lip. Don’t make faces trying to draw it in. 
Stick it out rather. Carry your head high. Look as if you 
were proud of your profile. Your dresses should always 
be straight and stiff like an oblong box. That one you’ve 
got on is too soft, and there’s too much trimming. You 
will be able to wear any amount of jewellery later, but 
never let yourself be tempted by lace. You walk well, and 
your back, thank God, is as flat as a board. You’ll never 
need to wear corsets if you’re careful, but you must learn 
what to do with your hands. You’re always clenching your 
fists as if you were going to hit somebody. And I don’t like 
those boys’ pumps you wear; they’re too round at the toe.” 
And so on and so on. And Jane, rather bewildered, would 
try to make out from all this whether her mother herself 
liked the person she was giving advice to or not. 

But in the end, in spite of all her cautiousness, Izzy was 
obliged to commit herself. Jane didn’t let her off. On the 
contrary she went straight to her one evening with the pro¬ 
posal Philibert had made her. It was late and Mrs. Car¬ 
penter was sitting in front of her fire, wondering whether 
she had been right in leaving the two alone together for so 
long in the drawing room. She had never left them alone 
before. It had been Philibert’s suggestion and she had 
agreed with some slight misgiving. It had occurred to her 
of a sudden that perhaps he would not have dared to make 
such a proposal to one of his own people, and she felt a flush 
of annoyance. Strange inconsistency on the part of a 
woman who had so thrown to the winds the spiritual de¬ 
cencies, but there you are; she was worried and mortified, 
and when Jane entered, turned to her with a warmer gesture 
than was her habit. The girl responded by kneeling at her 
side and winding her arms round the slim waist and say¬ 
ing— 

“Do you really want me to do it, Mother dear?” 

The question put in that way, suggesting as it did a keener 
insight on Jane’s part into her mother’s heart than had 


Jane—Our Stranger 75 

even been imagined by the latter, must have been startling. 
Mrs. Carpenter hesitated, hedged, was at a loss. 

“What do you mean, child?” 

But Jane was not to be put off. 

“You know what I mean, Mummy darling. The ques¬ 
tion is, do you really want it? I told him that I would do 
what you said, and I mean it.” And then rather quaintly 
she added—“I don’t suppose Aunt Patty would approve 
of me. She likes independence. But I have made up my 
mind to do as you wish.” 

There it was. Mrs. Carpenter was forced into it. Jane, 
all unknowingly, had her. It was no use asking the girl if 
she liked him: she only said she felt she undoubtedly would 
if she made up her mind to, and so at last after some more 
hesitating Izzy was obliged to say— 

“Well, darling, since you will have it so, I must tell you 
that your acceptance of this distinguished man would make 
me very happy.” And Jane, still uncommunicative and by 
some marvellous instinct of profound youth hiding at last 
the tumultuous feelings of her heart, accepted her mother’s 
decision sweetly and calmly and went away to her room. 

If she saw there in her mirror, as we are told girls do on 
such occasions, a new strange creature, the difference was 
in her case less fictitious than most. A very rapid trans¬ 
formation does seem to have come over her after this. It 
was as if in accepting Philibert she had walked bravely up 
to him and had given him the secret key to her soul, and 
as if in turn he had thrown a handful of dust in her eyes. 
The effect of the interchange was instantaneous. Philibert 
had seemed to her in the beginning, an old man, excessively 
foreign and occasionally ridiculous; he was now a hero. I 
cannot explain the change. I only know that it was so. 
The mystery of her girlhood remains to me a mystery. Who 
am I to understand her love for my detestable brother ? Who 
am I to understand the love of any innocent girl for any 
man? I only know that Jane’s passion was derived from 
her own romantic nature and not from him. I have a feel- 


76 Jane—Our Stranger 

ing that had she once made up her mind to love an iron 
poker, she would have loved it with the same fire and the 
same ecstasy. At that period of her life the object of her 
affection was scarcely more real than a symbol. Philibert 
represented for her not himself but her dreams. It may be 
so with most young people. I do not know. But what 
Jane meant when she said to her mother that she was sure 
she would come to like him if she made up her mind to, was 
really that she knew she would adore him if with her moth¬ 
er’s approval, she let herself go, i. e., let her imagination con¬ 
trol her feelings. What she wanted from her mother was 
not only an indication but a guarantee. Her mother’s con¬ 
sent to her marriage she took as a sign that she could glori¬ 
ously give her heart its freedom. 

And Jane’s heart now that he had won it was a surprise 
to Philibert. He had gone a-hunting for a dove or some 
timid sparrow, and he found himself with an eagle on his 
hands. He was expected to soar with this young companion 
that he had captured. There was no hesitation about Jane. 
Spreading wide the wings of her beautiful belief, she flew, 
she was making for heaven. 

Poor, wonderful, ignorant Jane. It was to her of a sim¬ 
plicity. Since she knew now, because her mother had 
said so, that he was worth marrying, then he was worthy 
of all her confidence. Shyly but bravely she told him so. 
She spoke to him of God, of life with him after death, of 
sharing with him all her thoughts. She unbared to him 
her ideals, confessed her dreams, faltered out her fear of her 
own wild impulses, recounting to him simply the affair of 
the boy in St. Mary’s Plains she had almost killed. She 
told him all about the Grey House and her Aunt Patty and 
her grandmother’s death and her Aunt Minnie’s religious 
fanaticism. It is dreadful to think of. He has said that 
he was never so bored in his life. I have heard him say so, 
and of course he would have been. After a rubber or two 
at the Jockey, he would turn up atTzzy’s flat for tea and 
find Jane waiting for him, her face charged with ‘grave 


Jane—Our Stranger 77 

confident sweetness. She would put a hand on each of 
his shoulders and kiss his lips, and then drawing him to a 
sofa beside her would hold his hand in both of hers and 
pour out to him the secrets of her heart, and he, beside 
himself with boredom, would listen and make his responses 
to the clear chant of her young voice singing its joy. 

'‘We will be everything to each other, Philibert.” 

“Yes, dear.” 

“We will share each other’s thoughts.” 

“Of course.” 

“You will teach me how to love you.” 

“I will.” 

“And be worthy of you.” 

“My darling.” 

“Love is very wonderful, Philibert.” 

“Yes, dear.” 

“I feel one should be very much alone to understand. 
You and I alone. We must keep ourselves free to be alone 
together.” 

“Yes.” 

“Sometimes I am sorry that we have so much money.” 

“Why, my darling?” 

“It will create obligations. We shall be expected to see 
so many people and do so many things. But I am glad to 
have it if you like it. I am proud to bring you something. 
I would give you everything in the world if I could. I am 
yours, and what I have is yours, to do with as you like. But 
you must never feel indebted to me, for there is no indebt¬ 
edness. I can’t quite explain what I mean, but it humiliates 
me even to think of giving between you and me. The money 
is ours, that is all, and therefore yours. You will control 
it and give me an allowance for dresses. I say this now 
because I don’t want to speak of it again. You under¬ 
stand, don’t you, Philibert? Let’s not talk of it any more, 
ever.” 

Such was her attitude, such was her idea, and all he had 
to do was to let himself be loved. 


78 Jane—Our Stranger 

But I don’t like to think about Philibert in his relation 
to Jane. I wish I could leave him out of the story alto¬ 
gether. 

In the meantime Mrs. Carpenter, while highly gratified 
that her plans had worked out so well, was nevertheless a 
little taken aback at the extravagant turn they were taking. 
She may well have been more then a little worried at Jane’s 
going ahead at such a pace. There was no comfort for 
Izzy now in conferring with Philibert. The shape of the 
triangle had changed. The coveted man had drawn away 
from her and was as close now to her daughter as he had 
once been to her. She found herself no longer the strong 
base that held them together. They could exist now with¬ 
out her. And Philibert began very delicately to make her 
feel this. His manner conveyed—“You have done your 
part, and very well on the whole, but still you know it’s fin¬ 
ished. You’re really no use to me now. I shan’t of course 
go back on my bargain. You shall have your share of the 
fun. Only don’t bother me by continually making myste¬ 
rious signs. You will only succeed in awakening her sus¬ 
picions and wearing out my patience.” 

Poor Jane, it would have taken more than her mother’s 
irritable gaiety to rouse her suspicions. If any one in those 
days had come to her with a full recital of the truth, she 
would not have believed a word of it. And when her Uncle 
Bradford did come in his capacity of trustee to have a look 
at the fiance, she flew into a rage with the good man at 
the first sign of his disapproval. I did not see Bradford 
Forbes. I never saw him. Jane tells me that he was a large 
heavy man with a strong American accent, a rosy face and 
a pince-nez. I should like to have seen him. I should like to 
have seen the image of Philibert reflected in those eye¬ 
glasses. The sight would have been edifying. 

Mr. Forbes had said to Jane—“Well, I don’t think much 
of your little Dude. I’d rather you had taken some one 
more your own size. I guess he can’t come much higher 
than your shoulder.” And Jane had flown at him like a 


Jane—Our Stranger 79 

wild cat and had told him that he had no business to make 
fun of her lover, who was the most important man in Paris 
and a million times cleverer than anybody from their home 
town. If her Uncle Bradford had had any hope of dissuad¬ 
ing her from the step she was about to take he seems to 
have abandoned it then and there. He could find out 
nothing positively wrong with the head of the house of 
Joigny. The little Marquis proved satisfactorily that 
though his income was pitiful he had no debts. And when 
Mr. Forbes pointed out to him that there could be nothing 
in the way of a marriage settlement, Silas Carpenter’s will 
making such an alienation of property impossible, Philibert 
had taken his breath away by the graceful ease with which 
he accepted the situation. How was the kind shrewd 
American citizen to know that Philibert already had the 
will by heart, and long ago had accepted the inconvenience 
and risk of hanging on to his wife’s property by hanging 
on to her? He made a better impression in their hour’s 
talk than Jane’s uncle wanted to admit to himself. The 
good man was obliged to fade away as he had come ; and 
float off like some wistful porpoise across the Atlantic leav¬ 
ing behind him only light ephemeral bubbles of amused 
disapproval. All the same he had done enough to make 
Jane very angry and obstinate and produce from her hand 
a long letter to her Aunt Patty in which she inveighed 
against the obtuse narrow-mindedness of the entire Ameri¬ 
can nation. Patience Forbes seems not to have answered 
this letter. She had sent Jane a note by her uncle of 
terse affection and grim good wishes, but her correspon¬ 
dence with her niece during the months preceding and fol¬ 
lowing the marriage almost entirely ceased. I imagine that 
after listening to her brother’s account of the man in Paris 
who was to claim her Jane, she was filled with foreboding, 
and being powerless chose to remain silent. And Jane was 
too happy to wonder why her aunt did not write to her. She 
did not often think of the Grey House during those days. 


VII 


M Y family, as I think I have already mentioned, had 
a way of doing disagreeable things gracefully. 
They could even when necessary carry off affairs 
disagreeable to themselves with every appearance of special 
pleasure. When Philibert asked my mother to gather to¬ 
gether the clan, all the uncles and aunts and cousins on 
my mother’s side and my father’s, so that he might present 
to them his fiancee, my mother apparently felt obliged 
to meet his wishes, not quite understanding the need for 
so much fuss, suspecting perhaps the truth that the cere¬ 
mony was a concession to that tiresome Mrs. Carpenter, 
yet determining once she had decided to do it, to do it nicely. 
Our relations in their turn recognized with the best possible 
grace the obligation she gently laid upon them in a series 
of little plaintive invitations to tea, and turned up smiling. 
Their smiles were various, there was plenty of variety in 
the family: we went in for cultivating our personalities; 
but there was nevertheless in the light of their expressive 
countenances a pleasant family resemblance, the stamp of a 
kinship that was cherished and valued. They all conveyed 
that it was for them at any time and without ulterior purpose 
an honour and a pleasure to be received by my mother, and 
that, however important the present occasion might be, the 
agreeable importance lay for them much more in finding her 
well than in meeting a stranger, her prospective daughter- 
in-law. 

My mother, in marrying my father, had married a second 
cousin, so that the two sides of the family were representa¬ 
tive of but one after all, and if within our own circle we 
admitted that the Joignys had in the last half century shown 

80 


Jane—Our Stranger 8i 

a more progressive spirit, had taken a more active interest 
in the affairs of the Republic, and had rubbed shoulders 
more freely with industrials and politicians than had the 
Mirecourts, the resulting difference felt was so slight, the 
nuance of manner and bearing so delicate, as to pass unper¬ 
ceived by the outer circle of society. We did not criticize 
each other. Some of the Joignys had made money, and 
one or two had married it. My father had been a royalist 
deputy, my Uncle Bertrand had been a Senator; on the 
other hand the Mirecourts had had an occasional relapse 
into the army and numbered even now a couple of cavalry 
officers. If there was among us a tacit understanding that 
the only thing worthy of us was to do nothing for the gov¬ 
ernment we detested, we never said so, and never blamed 
any one of our members for succumbing to the temptation 
of seeking an occupation. We were privileged people who 
could afford to amuse ourselves with modern affairs if it 
so pleased us, and at the expense of society if this took 
our fancy. Our philosophy was vaguely speaking to live as 
we had always lived under the Kings of France, and yet 
to keep intellectually very much abreast of the times. We 
had an abundance of ideas about everything. Modernism in 
art did not displease the younger members. On the contrary 
it was one of our characteristics to keep our old customs 
and discover at the same time new movements in music, 
painting and literature. We considered ourselves not in 
the least musty or moth-eaten. On the afternoon that I speak 
of we produced an effect the reverse of dingy or dreary, 
an effect of subdued brightness, of sprightly gentleness of 
unmodish elegance. We looked and were sure of ourselves. 
Republican France beyond our doors did not disturb us. 
We knew that we were clever enough to get the best of it 
for another generation or two anyway. We had clung to 
our lands, our forests and our meadows. We would cling 
to them still. We trusted to our wits to preserve us from 
the clumsy clutch of democracy. In the pleasant sanctuary 
of our family mansion we made fun of the outside world. 


82 Jane—Our Stranger 

My mother, looking very nice with a black lace scarf 
round her shoulders and her dark hair arranged in an elab¬ 
orate pattern of close little waves and puffs, received the 
homage of my aunts, uncles and cousins with wistful vivac¬ 
ity, asking them all with little gusts of enthusiasm about 
their affairs, and then tenderly sighing as if to convey to 
them how sympathetic was her appreciation of all their rich 
activities, in which she asked their indulgence for playing 
so passive a part. It was the last occasion in which she was 
to receive in the house that had been already sold to allow 
Philibert to marry the girl who was to be on view that day, 
but my mother gave no sign of appreciating any irony or 
any sadness in the situation. If the little gathering repre¬ 
sented for her a trial of some cruelty, she kept her sense 
of this perfectly disguised. With her boxes actually packed 
and her new modest apartment already cleansed and gar¬ 
nished preparatory to her arrival, she sat calmly and sweetly 
by the little wood fire at the end of the long suite of drearily 
august salons where she had known so many seasons of 
secluded temperate grandeur, holding a small embroidered 
screen between her face and the modest blaze of crackling 
birch logs. It was a cold November day. The rooms that 
had been thrown open were chilly. Not magnificent in 
size or in richness, but sparsely furnished, they were suffi¬ 
ciently vast to seem with their fifty odd occupants compara¬ 
tively empty, and presented to the eye polished vistas of 
waxed parquet, bland expanses of delicate panelling and 
high, dimly gilded cornices that were multiplied in numer¬ 
ous long mirrors. The rooms, as I say, were cold, and they 
looked cold. The dull day was darkening rapidly beyond 
the long windows. The lighted candles on the chimney- 
pieces left about them wide vague pools of shadow and 
made pockets of gloom behind important pieces of furniture. 

I remember feeling, while we waited for Jane, how beauti¬ 
fully all my relatives were behaving. There was in their 
modulated gaiety an absolute denial of discomfort or curi¬ 
osity or suspense. Their gestures, their chatter, their light 


Jane—Our Stranger 83 

laughter, expressed a perfect oblivion of the lowness of 
the temperature round them, or the imminence of an ordeal 
for my mother, or the general consciousness that Philibert 
had done something unusual and was about to ask for their 
approval. They had put on frock-coats, some of them, and 
others had put on silk dresses, but their way of greeting 
each other signified that any little extra effort of toilet was 
made simply out of courtesy to the family. I remember 
thinking, as I observed them, that there was perhaps no 
other family in France that took so much pains to be pleas¬ 
ant within its own circle, and that really on the whole we 
succeeded very well. It came to me too, looking at Tante 
Clothilde, Tante Belle and Tante Alice, and Oncle Louis 
and old Stanislas and Jean and Paul and Sigismond, that 
it was comparatively easy for us because we were gifted. 
Yes, I admitted, we were certainly gifted. We understood 
music and some of us were very passable musicians our¬ 
selves; and then there was Tante Suze who had translated 
Keats into French, and saintly Tante Alice who restored Ca¬ 
thedrals and Jean who wrote plays and Sigismond who did 
bacteriological research. Our gifts and our occupations, 
quite apart from our amusements, gave us plenty to talk 
about. Actually it was not a charming make-believe; we 
did enjoy meeting. And of all this give and take of affec¬ 
tionate recognition, Claire my sister was the centre. The 
aunts and uncles and cousins adored Claire. She was the 
perfect product of their blood, and they understood her, and 
loving her they appreciated themselves and were conscious 
of the solidarity of their indestructible social unity. She 
meant even more to them than my mother because she was 
young, and since her unfortunate marriage she had for them 
the added charm of a martyr. If they had ever been willing 
to criticize my mother they would have blamed her for giv¬ 
ing her daughter to such a man as my brother-in-law. 
There was not a man in the room who did not dislike him 
and who would not have taken up the cudgels for Claire at 
the slightest sign of her finger. The unpopular outsider was 


84 Jane—Our Stranger 

not there. He had perhaps understood that he was expected 
to stay away. Even an automobile merchant can be made 
to feel when he is not wanted. The poor brute’s skin 
was perhaps not as thick as they thought. No one, how¬ 
ever, remarked on his absence. No one asked after him or 
mentioned his name. Had he behaved as he had been ex¬ 
pected to behave, and had Claire wished it, they would 
have been kind to him, but he had made one or two mis¬ 
takes, and Claire had shown no signs of wanting them to 
take him into their circle. He had taken her away to 
Neuilly, had almost literally locked her up there, and had 
offered to lend several of them money, at a high rate of 
interest. Also he had asked Bianca’s father, (who was there 
by the way that day, though Bianca was not), to get him 
into the Jockey Club. It had been impossible not to snub 
him. They all felt very sorry for Claire. 

Philibert’s affairs were different. A man need never be 
the slave of his menage. Philibert they knew could quite 
well look after himself. They had heard that the fortune 
of the young American was gigantic. Philibert would 
know beautifully how to spend millions, they said to 
themselves. That was one of the things that we, as a 
family, had always known how to do. They admitted 
willingly that Philibert was in his way eminently worthy of 
themselves. His faults were in keeping with their tradi¬ 
tions ; he had never made any of them blush. They trusted 
he was not about to do so now. They hoped the young 
American girl would not be too impossible. Some Ameri¬ 
cans whom they knew were charming, but it was not always 
the richest who were the nicest. Alas, one could not have 
everything. They would be kind to the child, however 
awful she might be. It was always worth while being kind, 
and besides did one really know how to be anything else 
to a woman? Had one, as a matter of fact, any bad man¬ 
ners tucked away anywhere to bring out on any occasion? 

But of course, none of this appeared in their conversa¬ 
tion, and as I say, no one could have detected in their manner 


Jane—Our Stranger 85 

any sign of curiosity or nervousness. And when at last 
the butler announced at the far end of the Grand Salon 
‘‘Madame Carpenter et Mademoiselle Carpenter,” it was 
with a scarcely perceptible shifting of positions and straight¬ 
ening of attention that they made a kind of circle extending 
out on either side of my mother, who rose from her chair 
by the fire in the inner apartment and advanced two steps 
towards the distant figures that appeared in the far doorway 
of the outer room. 

I recognized Jane at once as the girl who has walked 
down my street, my cossack princess, my wild crowned 
creature of the steppes. She had a long way to go and she 
came on slowly and smoothly, with a lightness in her gait 
that had about it a certain grandeur and a dignity that 
seemed at the same time somehow rather shy and timid. 
She reminded me of some nervous creature who was accus¬ 
tomed to traversing vast tracks of open country and who 
might be frightened away by the stir of a twig. I saw in 
another moment that she was not frightened. She gave my 
mother the slightest and most correct of courtseys, and 
then stood quite still while her own mother talked to the 
lady who had so persistently and gently snubbed her. 
It was, however, to strike me very soon as one of the 
interesting things about Jane that, although she was 
not frightened when she first came in, she was beginning 
to feel so ten minutes later. I put this down as the first 
proof she gave me of being intelligent. 

Mrs. Carpenter may have drained from that hour in our 
paternal mansion some deep draught of pleasure; I do 
not know. It is possible that she regarded her entry into 
our chilly drawing room as a social triumph; if so she be¬ 
trayed no such feeling. She, too, as well as my mother, 
was capable of elegant dissimulation. Her rich black figure, 
marvellously moulded into its lustrous garment, was of a 
dignity that surpassed everything that quite put my gentle 
mother in the shade. I can imagine her full, bright con¬ 
sciousness of this. There was something in the poise of 


86 Jane—Our Stranger 

her high modish grey head that expressed astonishment as 
she shook hands with her little hostess. It was as if she 
marvelled that so unimpressive a woman, with really no 
pretensions at all to a figure, should hold such sway in the 
world. A good many of the others she knew. SomeTiad 
eaten from her golden plates, others had left cards but not 
eaten, a few had invited her to “evenings.” She greeted 
them with an easy security of manner that was quite suf¬ 
ficiently a match for their own shriller effusiveness. 
If they were not inordinately pleased, well they seemed so, 
and if she was, then she did not show it. The comedy was 
well played by both sides. 

She had dressed her daughter rather cleverly for the oc¬ 
casion. Jane had on a straight close-fitting costume of 
some mouse-grey material that had the texture of a suede 
glove. As I remember it, it was cut like a Russian jacket, 
trimmed with bands of grey fur, and topped by a close 
grey fur hat with a green cockade that matched her eyes. 
That was all; the dress was warm and plain, well adapted 
to the weather and to the girl’s age, and gave her no look 
of wealth. The most it did was to set off with severe 
modesty the splendid proportions of her strong young body. 

What I think we all felt when Jane entered was the 
warmth and vitality of her youth. She was so very much 
more alive than all the rest of us that we could not help 
noticing it. We felt cold and dry beside her, and rather 
small. We were literally, almost all of us, smaller than 
she was. This was disconcerting: I caught actually on my 
mother’s face after the first presentation had taken place 
an almost comic expression, and could not make out what 
she was after as she looked quickly from one to the other, 
until I discovered that she was simply looking for some one 
to put next the girl who was tall enough to look well beside 
her. My mother had an eye for tableaux vivants; she did 
not like to see a woman towering above men. Not finding 
any one she was reduced to sitting down herself, and mo¬ 
tioning the great long child to a stool at her knee. It was 


Jane—Our Stranger 87 

then that I realized Jane was growing frightened, and was 
struck by the keenness of her perceptions. There was noth¬ 
ing obvious to frighten her, and yet there was something 
in the air for a fine sensitive nostril to sniff at in alarm if 
it were fine enough; just the faintest whiff of antagonism, 
an antagonism tempered and mingled with curiosity, sur¬ 
prise and humour. 

My family saw possibilities in Jane. Of that I became 
growingly conscious. It was evident in the way they eyed 
her with rapid sidelong glances, appraising tilts of the head, 
steps to the side to get a closer or different view, and in 
their murmured undertones. They did not discuss her then 
and there, they did not whisper, they were not rude, God 
forbid, but they showed that they were struck. She engaged 
their attention and was more of a person than they had bar¬ 
gained for. They looked from her to her mother and back 
again with lifted eyebrows. They were surprised to find 
that Mrs. Carpenter had such a daughter. It was clear to 
them that something could be made out of Jane. 

The girl sat on her low seat quite still, one -hand in her 
lap, the other hanging down by her side, and while she 
answered my mother’s questions, shot an occasional clear 
glance from under her eyebrows at the people around her. 
I saw that she was nervous, but not too nervous to take in 
a great deal. I was impressed by the amount she did 
seem to take in. 

Philibert all this time hung off in a corner and watched 
her. She never once looked at him. She seemed deter¬ 
mined not to do so. If he were putting her to some sort 
of a test she was obviously going to go through the ordeal 
without an appeal for aid. It was a fine performance; un¬ 
fortunately no one but myself appeared to appreciate it. 

Her nervousness evidently had something to do with her 
deep desire to please, and her increasing realization that 
these relations of Philibert’s were not people easily pleased 
with anything or any one. She felt that she was the object 
of a finer scrutiny than she had ever before undergone. 


88 Jane—Our Stranger 

Her eyes searched rapidly one face then another, and veiled 
themselves again under lowered lids. The one thing that 
might have consoled her in her sense of their superlative 
fastidiousness was, however, just the thing that she could 
not divine. She didn’t know that they none of them cared 
a fig for pretty doll faces and found her ugly strangeness 
a very good substitute. It had not yet dawned on her, 
in spite of her mother’s preaching, that her countenance 
was just the sort of thing that would have worth for sophisti¬ 
cated people. 

I don’t remember just how long this part of the show 
lasted, or just how Philibert suddenly changed its character 
and made the whole thing seem like a circus performance 
with himself as ringmaster and his fiancee as the high- 
stepper whom he was showing off to the spectators, but 
that is nevertheless what happened. 

I had taken a long look at my brother that day. It had 
come to me, watching the attention and respect with which 
my august uncles treated him, that perhaps I had never 
done him justice. It was obvious that they liked him and 
that he not only amused them vastly, but imposed himself 
on them. He had talked to them with even more than his 
usual brilliance, and all Paris knows what that means, and 
I had listened to his talk marvelling at the power of words. 
Paris can never resist words; France succumbs inevitably 
to talk. No one, I was forced to admit, was such a talker 
as Philibert. Like a consummate juggler keeping half a 
dozen ivory balls in the air, he played with ideas and 
phrases. Gaily he tossed up epigrams and paradoxes, let 
fly a challenge, caught it with a counter-challenge, argued 
two sides of a question, flung wide a generality, chopped 
it into bits in a second, was serious for two minutes, 
mimicked a public character, gave a sketch of the political 
situation, recounted a recent scandal. The faces of his 
auditors were a study. They were the faces of delighted 
spectators at a play. Positively I expected them now and 
then to applaud. My Aunt Suze was wiping her eyes, weep- 


Jane—Our Stranger 89 

ing with laughter. Uncle Louis was waving his handkerchief 
excitedly and ejaculating “Parfaitement, parfaitement. Je 
vois cela cTici.” Bianca’s father, his rubicund face wrinkled 
into a masque of comedy, was watching out of the corner of 
his sporting eye and muttering affectionately— “Ah, le co- 
quin^ ah quel comedienP And my dear little mother from 
her place by the fire was smiling shyly over her fire screen, 
her eyes filled with gentle adoration. 

I have heard women rave about the fineness of Philibert’s 
features, the nobility of his nose, which was certainly a good 
and generous example of our high type, signs of the race in 
the drawing of his head. I suppose it is true that he had 
something special about his head. It was the same head 
after all that had hung on our walls for generations, capped 
by Cardinals’ bonnets and courtiers’ wigs. Nevertheless, 
when he called to Jane he looked suddenly like a ringmaster 
in a circus. With his little waxed moustache and his little 
perky coat-tails and his lightly gesturing hand positively 
creating in space the image and sound of a delicate long- 
lashed whip, he put Jane through her paces. He had her 
beautifully trained. He had done it all in a month. She 
was perfectly in hand. 

At the sound of his voice she had sprung to her feet. Yes, 
it was a spring, quite sufficiently quick to startle my mother. 
Ha, but that was a mistake at the very beginning. She was 
made to turn and mutely apologize. Whist! she obeyed the 
sign and crossed to the venerable and monstrous Aunt Clo- 
thilde who sat like a large brown Buddha by the window. 
“A lower curtsey this time and kiss the plump old hand. 
Step backward now and smile at these gentlemen. Hold up 
your head. Right about turn, straight across the ring. Not 
too fast—proudly do it—show them how you can walk. 
Aha, what made you do that? No stumbling, mind you. 
High-steppers don’t look at their feet. Flip—just a flick of 
the lash to put more life into you.” 

I watched fascinated. I watched till I could bear it no 
longer. I said to Claire—“Lead the way into the dining- 


90 Jane—Our Stranger 

room. Tea’s been ready this hour.” And Claire went for¬ 
ward gracefully and put an arm through the trembling crea¬ 
ture’s and led her away from her master; but I saw the girl’s 
eyes ask for leave, and I saw him condescendingly grant it. 
By the tea-table I joined her, and heard the rattle of the cup 
in her hand against the saucer. She greeted me with a smile 
of extreme youthfulness that tried to conceal nothing. Look¬ 
ing down at me timidly from her splendid height, her pale 
countenance made me the frankest fullest confession and 
asked wistfully for help, and seemed presently to find relief. 

“Philibert did not tell me there were so many of you,” she 
said quaintly in French. 

“We are all here, every one of us,” I rejoined. “We 
rushed to welcome you.” 

She accepted this in silence, and I saw her gaze travel 
across to my sister who stood in the window, and rest there 
with vivid interest. 

“You admire my sister?” I asked in English. 

“Immensely. I hope she will like me. If only she did 
I wouldn’t mind.” 

“The others? But they all will.” 

“Do you think so?” 

“I am sure of it.” 

She sighed and looked at me gravely. She seemed to be 
thinking deeply, and she seemed very very young. 

“There are so many differences,” she said after a moment’s 
hesitation. 

“Not so many as you imagine,” I protested. 

“I don’t always understand what they mean,” and then 
with a quick lighting up of her expression—“You will in¬ 
terpret.” 

“But you speak very excellent French,” I again objected. 

“Ah, it wasn’t the language I meant,” was the reply that 
came from those grave parted lips. 

Philibert at that moment approached and laid a finger on 
my shoulder. His words, however, were not addressed to 
W, 


Jane—Our Stranger 91 

. “ Do "’ t y° u think >” he said lightly, “that such an absorbing 
tete-a-tete might be postponed to another day ? It’s not very 
polite to your elders.” 

I saw the poor girl quiver. I saw the slow flood of crim¬ 
son mantle her face and forehead and flush to the tips of her 
ears. I saw her stare at my brother humbly, and then I 
watched her slink off at his side, like a great dog that he led 
by a chain and to whom he had given a whipping. The sight 
filled me with disgusting pain. I turned on my heel and 
joined Claire in her window. 

“A pretty sight, isn’t it ?” I spluttered. 

“But, mon cher, she adores him.” 

“Just so.” 

My sister eyed me a little strangely. 

“You don’t like that?” she asked. 

“Do you?” I retorted. 

She shrugged her shoulders and gave a little laugh. “Of 
course it would be still nicer,” she mocked lightly, “if he 
adored her as well. But what will you ? Such is life ?” 

I felt how hopeless it was. I had a foretaste of how my 
sympathy for Jane was to isolate me. 

“She admires you any way extravagantly,” I persisted with 
petulance. Claire only laughed. 

“I should think she would do everything extravagantly,” 
was her reply as she floated away. 

“Do be a little kind to the child,” I cried out after her, 
and she just nodded at me over her shoulder. How charm¬ 
ing her face was seen thus, framed in her dark drooping hat 
and black furs, the slender glowing olive oval, the sombre 
eyes, the lovely teeth, how charming, how teasing, how elu¬ 
sive; and her slim figure with its trailing draperies, how 
easily it slipped away from all effort, all responsibility. 

Jane was gone when I re-entered the drawing room. I 
gathered that she had made a favourable impression. Aunts 
and uncles and cousins were taking leave of my mother with 
phrases of congratulation. 

“Elle est charnumte ” 


92 Jane—Our Stranger 

“Une taille superbe 

“Philibert will dress her beautifully.” 

“So young, so healthy.” 

“Such nice manners.” 

“And how she adores him, it’s, quite touching.” 

“Fifi always was lucky.” 

The masculine element was almost vociferous. 

“Sapristi, an enormous fortune, and a fine young creature ' 
like that.” 

One by one they bowed over my mother’s hand, and went 
away. My mother looked very tired. She motioned me to 
remain. Claire hung over her tenderly. 

“Pauvre petite mere ” she said, kissing the top of her 
head. “You must go straight to bed. All these emotions 
have been too much for you. I will come in the morning to 
see to the packing of the last things. Don’t stir. Just stay 
quiet. All the same, it’s too bad, her turning you out of your 
own house.” 

I said nothing. Something warned me not to take up 
Jane’s defence just then, and I, too, felt sorry for my mother. 
When we were alone, she laid her head against the back of 
the chair and closed her eyes. Presently, however, without 
opening them she spoke with surprising energy. 

“I have had to promise to dine with that woman,” was 
what she said. 


VIII 


J ANE had made no impression on my mother. Mrs. 
Carpenter had made too much of one. She had de¬ 
flected my mother’s attention from Jane to herself and 
this, with unfortunate consequences. Mrs. Carpenter af¬ 
fected my mother like a loud and unpleasant noise, and my 
mother hated noises more than anything in the world. I am 
not trying to be witty. I mean this literally. I have seen my 
mother grow pale with a sort of nervous nausea and close her 
eyes in a desperate effort to control the faintness that came 
over her at the sound of a harsh ugly voice raised in anger. 
There was something about Mrs. Carpenter that set her 
nerves on edge in the same way. Her metallic jingling 
clothes, her loose easy swagger, her wiry grey curls, her hu¬ 
morous rolling eye, made up an ensemble that though to 
most people not seemingly at all “loud” gave my mother sen¬ 
sations of clashing and clanging. When she was about it 
was impossible for Marnan to think of or listen to any one 
else. All the effort of her hypersensitive nervous organism 
was concentrated on just simply bearing her, and she was 
obliged now to bear her often and for hours at a time. Mrs. 
Carpenter didn’t let her off. She had wanted to know my 
mother; she knew her now and she made the most of her. 

During the weeks that preceded the wedding, Izzy was in¬ 
cessantly with my mother. She was in the highest of gay 
good humours. A big fashionable wedding to prepare for, 
she was in her element. Having achieved her ambition she 
professed to take it all as a joke. She treated the approach¬ 
ing marriage of her daughter as a great lark and wanted my 
mother to have her share of the fun. She consulted her 
about everything, submitted lists and samples of engraved 
invitations, dragged her to dressmakers who were preparing 

93 


94 Jane—Our Stranger 

the trousseau and made her come and help open presents. 
I have a picture of my mother in a corner of Mrs. Carpen¬ 
ter’s drawing room, limp and pale in her black clothes, sub¬ 
merged in cardboard and tissue paper, while the indefati¬ 
gable Izzy on her knees in the middle of the floor held up 
one object after another and gave vent to shouts of indis¬ 
criminate rapture or groans of unenlightened contempt. 
Poor, dreadful Izzy. She had such definite ideas about 
things. Her ignorance was confident and documented. She 
had priced every marble and bronze in Paris. No jeweller’s 
shop held any secrets for her. She was a connoisseur in lace. 
But the little tarnished faded treasures sent by some of our 
relatives to Philibert’s bride belonged to no such category, 
and were viewed with bewildered disdain. Antique furni¬ 
ture had never been seen in her own apartment, but she 
knew that cracked lacquer and tarnished gilding was re¬ 
spectable in tables and chairs. Beyond that she could not 
go. Her instinct had stood in the way of her desire to 
learn. She clung irresistibly to baubles and coveted with 
passion the massive silver tea service sent by Aunt Go. I 
know that Aunt Clo hesitated between this and an exquisite 
Ingres drawing. I remember Izzy weighing the monstrous 
kettle in her hands, her face a study of shrewd gloating ap- 
prisal and her knee planted firmly on the face of a poor little 
Louis XV doll that had come from Aunt Marianne’s cab¬ 
inet of XVIII century toys. 

It was unfortunate that my mother was forced to assist at 
these seances, and that Jane herself was so often absent try¬ 
ing on clothes. The absence of the one and the ignorance of 
the other were proofs to my mother that neither knew how 
to behave. She judged Izzy as if she were a Frenchwoman 
and supposed that because the noisy creature did not know a 
treasure of art when she saw it that she most probably put 
her knife in her mouth. And so during those days that 
would have exhausted a much more robust woman than my 
mother, Izzy did, I believe, at the very beginning of Jane’s 
life with us, use up all the vitality that Maman could 


Jane—Our Stranger 95 

dispose of on behalf of Philibert’s American family. 

The dinner she was obliged to attend for which Mrs. 
Carpenter had collected two ambassadors and a slangy 
Duchess was the last straw. My mother had never been to 
such a dinner in her life, and I confess to a complete sym¬ 
pathy with her when she gasped out afterwards that it was 
incredible that she should have been preserved from such 
ordeals throughout her youth when she had enough energy 
to bear them, only to be subjected to them in her old age 
when she hadn’t. That dinner, with its ten courses, was the 
funeral feast of a relationship not yet born, but that might 
truly have come into being and flowered to full sweetness 
between the grave awkward girl in the straight white frock, 
and the little quivering lady whose twitching eyebrows and 
frightened hurried glances alone testified to her acute agony 
of soul. Poor Maman, poor Jane, poor Izzy. I was there. 
I saw, and I did not realize the full meaning. I did not 
realize how lasting the effect would be. I was on the con¬ 
trary absurdly reassured because of Jane herself. I saw in 
her silence, her gravity, her perfect timid deference to my 
mother, a promise of future felicity. I gathered that she 
would never be guilty of publicly blushing for her own parent, 
but that she would and did appreciate mine. I was right 
in this, but I was wrong in believing that my mother would 
appreciate in her turn the tender tribute. I reckoned with¬ 
out her nerves, her weariness, her discouraged sense of being 
victimized and exposed, all the accumulations of her years of 
abhorrence of the thing that was now thrust upon her. She 
had complained so little that I had failed to understand how 
deeply humiliating to her were the circumstances of her son’s 
marriage. She considered it indisputably a mesalliance, and 
yet she was forced to appear to rejoice in it with indecent 
exhibitions of familiarity. Mrs. Carpenter not only had 
disregarded her request for a little family gathering but had 
evidently succumbed to the desire to show her to just those 
people who, not having yet seen her, would especially rel¬ 
ish the sight. “Just as if, mon cher” my mother wailed 


96 Jane—Our Stranger 

afterwards, “I were anything to look at. Fancy wanting to 
show me, a skimpy bundle of black clothes.” She had 
done violence to herself in going to that dreadful apartment 
in the Avenue du Bois, and the effort was too much 
for her. The place was too much for her. She never 
forgot it and, I believe she never looked at Jane without re¬ 
membering those golden plates, those loud nasal voices, those 
large glasses full of crushed ice and green peppermint, those 
horrid scraping fiddles. To my mother such an evening was 
a souvenir to last her the rest of her days. The most she 
could do after that was not actively to dislike her daughter- 
in-law, and she seemed to achieve this by cultivating in all 
that concerned that young person a consistent vagueness. 
When people talked of Jane she only half listened and an¬ 
swered irrelevantly. Her phrase was always the same— 
“Mats oui, die est si gentitle.” When Jane herself was 
there she would look absent-mindedly beyond her and put 
her phrase in another form and murmur— “Comme vons 
etes gentitle.” Jane could never get any further than that. 
It constituted a barrier, graceful and light as gossamer, im¬ 
penetrable as steel armour. All the girl’s longing to be 
loved and to please, all her naive attentions, all her thought¬ 
ful plans for the older woman’s comfort, were met with the 
same sweet gentle vagueness. When she brought flowers, 
when she asked advice, when she put her motor at the other’s 
disposal, when she asked her to come to her, it was always 
—“Comme vous etes gentitle followed by a little plaintive 
sigh that the girl gradually came to understand. Even when 
she worked out and carried through all on her own, a scheme 
for adding considerably to my mother’s material ease, the 
formula was merely changed to “Vous etes vraiment trop 
gcntille }> and finally when Jane’s baby was born, and she 
believed that at last her mother-in-law would show some 
warmth of feeling, the words that greeted her when she 
opened her eyes and saw the latter leaning over the bassinet, 
were—“Comme elle est gentille,” this time addressed to the 
slumbering infant. 


Jane— Our Stranger 97 

I know that my mother tried to be kind to Jane, and I 
believe that she was never positively unkind, never at least 
during those first years of her marriage, but aside from the 
unpleasant pressure Mrs. Carpenter had brought upon her 
and that had given her a kind of chronic nervous depression 
in all that concerned Jane, there was also the fact that Jane 
was not the sort of person who would ever have appealed 
to her. My mother liked Bianca and had wanted her for 
a daughter-in-law; how then could she love Jane who was 
the antithesis of Bianca, and who by usurping Bianca’s place, 
so my mother put it to herself, brought the contrast con¬ 
stantly to her mind? I have heard my mother say that she 
liked people to be more interesting than they looked, and 
found it amusing to be with people whom she was led on 
by some subtle provocative charm to discover. She recog¬ 
nized this charm in Bianca without ever discovering the 
sinister meaning of it, and she felt that Jane showed too much 
and therefore promised too little. Jane was too big and too 
striking to please her. She made, to my mother’s eyes, too 
much of a display. My mother liked above everything 
“mesure” Her favourite form of condemnation was to call 
a thing “exagere.” What at bottom she cared most for in 
a person was their being “comme il faut” I don’t believe 
that she ever went so far as to consider her daughter-in-law 
vulgar, but there were things about her that she would have 
called “outre” If she had ever allowed herself to depart 
from the vague affectionate affability that she preserved so 
consistently and so bafflingly, she would have said, (perhaps 
she did say something of the kind to Claire, I know they 
discussed Jane between them) that there was something al¬ 
most shocking in a young woman with such an ugly face 
having such a beautiful figure. They, Claire and Maman, 
would have liked the ugliness of the face better if it had not 
been held so high on such splendid shoulders. They would 
have forgiven Jane her profile if it had not been for her 
really marvellous hands and feet. In the same way they 
would have known better how to deal with the whole strik- 


98 Jane—Our Stranger 

ing physical being if it had not gone with such shyness and 
such humility. What they could not make out, and found 
it hard to put up with, were her incongruities. Such looks 
should aesthetically have been combined with audacity and 
hardness. Instead they found on their hands a poor quaking 
creature of a pathetic docility who seemed to present to 
them on her lovely palms an exposed and visibly pulsating 
heart, that they didn’t know what to do with, didn’t want to 
touch, were positively afraid of. It seems strange, but it 
was nevertheless true that Jane frightened them. Her need 
of them exposed there quite simply to their gaze, her simple, 
inarticulate but all too visible desire to love them and be 
loved, made them turn away in a kind of flurry that was 
partly delicacy and partly fear. There was an intensity 
about her that opened dangerous and wearying vistas of 
emotion which they wished at all costs to avoid. Claire 
said to me one day— 

“Mother is afraid Jane will crush her, throw herself on 
her, I mean, literally, and hug and squeeze her, and she 
doesn’t like physical contact of that sort, you know that.” 

Of course I knew. We all knew. From our earliest 
years we had always approached Maman as it were on tiptoe, 
delicately, as if she were made of some precious perishable 
stuff that would be broken at a rude touch. Our sense of 
this had been for us one of her subtlest charms. When she 
allowed us to kiss her we did so lightly and quietly. The 
touch of our lips on her hair or her soft worn cheek, was the 
fleeting pleasure of a winged instant, yet it was a pleasure; 
she had a way of conveying to it a quality, a fine quick 
elusive meaning. We never felt that we had been cheated, 
on the contrary, her kisses were rare and might have been 
deemed meagre, but they were beautiful. There was a 
grace in the way she laid her hand on one’s arm and drew 
one down that was more than artistry; it conveyed a sense 
of something precious that had never been vulgarized by 
handling and mauling. I do not remember her ever folding 
any of us in her arms, and if my memory of her demonstra- 


Jane—Our Stranger 99 

tions is particularly acute because they were more often for 
Claire or for Philibert than for me, that only proves that I 
know what I mean and in no way diminished the beauty of 
what I was so often able to observe from my distance. The 
act of opening wide her arms would have been extraordinary 
in my mother. I never saw it. With Claire who was the 
person in the world to whom she was closest, I often noticed 
how delicate and restrained was her manner, and yet some¬ 
how with scarce any demonstrations of affection, they con¬ 
veyed to each other an infinite tenderness. They were con¬ 
stantly together, they talked everything over. Claire had, 
I believe, no secrets from Maman. They depended on each 
other. Together they tasted the ineffable sweetness of al¬ 
most perfect communion. And yet I never saw them cling 
together, I never surprised them in each other’s arms. So 
strangely alike, so perfectly in harmony, they reminded 
me sometimes of characters on the stage, two figures in 
some graceful pantomine who had been drilled to make the 
same gestures in time to the same music and who moved 
always through the close articulate measure of their parts 
in perfect unison, tracing parallel patterns in the space 
round them, mysteriously united yet never touching and 
scarcely ever looking at each other. 

Such an impression I sometimes had in the old days 
when I still lived in the bosom of the family, and now, as 
a kind of moral outcast, looking back I find even more in 
it than I did then. I see them not so much as actors who 
had learned a part, but almost as hypnotized beings who, 
whether they wished it or not, were bound to move and 
act and speak in a certain way. What it all comes to, I 
suppose, is that they were the fine perfect products of a 
system that held their individualities chained. So perfectly 
representative of their class, of their race, of the discrimina¬ 
tive intolerant idea of their forebears, as to have been born 
with a complete set of gestures and prejudices and prefer¬ 
ences and vocal intonations all ready for them, existing 
in them regardless of their own volition. I see them as 


TOO 


Jane—Our Stranger 

the slaves of a hyper-sensitive, super-subtle inheritance, and 
I understand that with them many things were more truly 
impossible than with most people. It was impossible for 
them to make an ugly abrupt movement. The strong oc¬ 
cult force of their breeding controlled their limbs and 
gave them a kind of grace that if one watched carefully 
was reminiscent of heavy powdered wigs and unwieldy 
panniers. It was impossible for them to mingle in crowds 
or walk along the street or take an interest in public affairs. 
It was impossible for them to look at the public without 
scorn or subject themselves to the physical contact of poor 
people in crowded trains. Instinctively they manoeuvred 
to hide themselves from the eyes of the public. It was 
really as if they had lived under another regime and could 
not quite realize this one. 

How could I not understand what Claire meant when she 
said that Maman was afraid that Jane would crush her? 
Jane was no reincarnation of some spoiled beauty of an¬ 
other century. If she represented any one but her glorious 
healthy self, it was more likely a Red Indian princess or 
a blond Norse amazon. Jane had not learned in a previous 
existence how to conceal one set of feelings and delicately 
convey another. She did not even know that such feats 
were expected of her. She would learn, but it would take 
time. For the moment she was just obviously what she 
seemed, a brave ardent young thing, capable of all sorts 
of mistakes. She would come in with her long beautiful 
stride and tower over my mother and sweep down to her; 
to Claire it seemed like swooping not sweeping, and my 
mother would huddle in her chair and struggle against the 
inclination to shut her eyes, and then the confused, intimi¬ 
dated, glowing creature in the marvellous clothes of Phili¬ 
bert’s designing, would sit dumbly, wistfully, waiting and 
wanting something, anything in the way of a crumb of com¬ 
fort; would watch for any sign of unstudied natural joy 
at her presence and would accept in its place the pleasant 
flow of my mother’s vague affability, and would go away 


Jane—Our Stranger ioi 

humbly, to come back the next day with an offering, flowers 
or a book or some precious little gift, and always my mother 
would say —“Comme vous etes gentille 
And besides all this the things that Jane and Philibert 
did were not calculated to amuse my mother in the least. 
She had never cared about public shows, and had always 
considered the fine art of entertaining to exist in the num¬ 
ber of people one eliminated. Philibert’s enormous parties, 
his balls, his dinners of a hundred couples, his fantastic 
“Fetes Champetres ” dismayed her. She thought they were 
Jane’s parties. It was Jane whom she held responsible 
for all that was spectacular in the brilliant existence of her 
son; it was Jane she blamed for the phenomenal marble Paris 
mansion. It would have been impossible to have explained 
to her that Jane had scarcely glanced at the plans of the 
house when Philibert presented them to her. She refused 
to go to any of their parties. Her dislike of magnificence 
was a part of her deep absolute view of what was “comme 
il faut Magnificence was suitable to crowned heads, and 
though she would not have admitted that anything was too 
good for her son, she did not like to see him playing at being 
a king, and perhaps because all her life she had cherished a 
loyal personal sentiment for the destitute Orleans family, tak¬ 
ing their political mourning for her own, it filled her with 
horror to find her son surrounded by all the trappings of an 
actor monarch and scattering largesse to the rabble, in a 
way her impoverished, unrecognized, exiled sovereign could 
not do. His enormous house, which she persisted in be¬ 
lieving to be Jane’s, depressed her. The really phenomenal 
harmony of its richness escaped her. The regal vistas of 
its apartments, all warmed and glowing and made by her 
son’s consummate artistry habitable left her cold. The 
fine tapestries, the riot of blended colour, the audacious 
effects of light and shadow, the profusion of precious lus¬ 
trous silks and gleaming brocades, wearied her gaze. Know¬ 
ing well enough, who better, good things when she saw 
them, there were here too many to look at. I have 


102 


Jane—Our Stranger 

pathetic memories of her shrunken black figure trip¬ 
ping through those immense chambers on Philibert’s 
arm. I see her pass with little pattering steps across 
the endless expanse of polished floor, her lorgnon to her 
eyes, her head turning this way and that with quick bird¬ 
like movements, pretending to look at everything while 
refusing to see anything at all. The size of the place op¬ 
pressed her and made her suspicious. She could not be¬ 
lieve that such enormous rooms could be full of fine little 
treasures. Her experience told her that fine pieces were 
rare and were kept under glass, and were not to be bought, 
save at a price. Even Jane’s fortune, which she had been 
so often made to feel was too much for good taste, could 
not in her opinion have filled that house with genuine things. 
Her son had been led astray. He was guilty of imitation. 
If he took her straight up to a gem of a cabinet and made 
her scrutinize it, well, she admitted its existence, but what 
was one cabinet in a room where there were twenty? She 
was in her way incorrigible. She did not believe in mira¬ 
cles, and while the rest of Paris was gaping it only made her 
feel dreadfully tired to be so put upon. That was her 
real feeling about the gigantic mansion. It made her feel 
tired. She was obliged to take the grand staircase slowly 
and stop on each landing. With her hand on the polished 
marble balustrade she toiled up it panting, gently catch¬ 
ing her breath in the presence of mocking marble fauns and 
disdainful goddesses. Dear little fragile figure, growing 
smaller and more bent with time in her unmodish garments 
and simple black bonnet, fine proud gentle lady, I believe in 
the bottom of her heart she was sometimes afraid one of 
the army of constantly changing footmen would mistake her 
identity and show her to the housekeeper’s room. It was 
the sort of thing she would have taken as a horrid joke with 
a dreadful moral. 

I find that I am taking a vast deal of trouble and time 
in explaining my own family, and seem to be getting abso- 


Jane—Our Stranger 103 

lutely no nearer my goal, that is the heart of Jane’s own 
problem. And yet I am sure it was all a part of it. In 
going into my mother’s feelings in such detail, I do so be¬ 
cause of what happened later, and I sometimes wonder 
whether perhaps my mother foresaw what was going to 
happen and knowing whichever way it turned out that she 
was going to take Philibert’s part, made up her mind at the 
outset that it would all be much simpler if she never gave 
Jane any encouragement to expect anything else. Her atti¬ 
tude of increasing aloofness as time went on becomes more 
explicable if one interprets it as an anticipation of trouble. 
Heaven knows trouble was obvious enough to anybody 
who was interested. Weren’t there bets on at the club 
as to how long Philibert would stand it, that is, his enforced 
conjugal felicity? And other bets as to how long it would 
take his wife to find out certain things that every one else 
knew? It required no special prophetic gift to foresee that 
some day something was bound to happen, and I am sure 
my mother foresaw it. But I am a little puzzled as to why 
Philibert himself chose to make matters worse by keeping 
his wife and mother estranged, for I am perfectly sure 
that if Philibert had wanted my mother to love Jane, she 
would have done it, simply because she always did what 
he asked her. And again, if Maman had brought herself 
to care for Jane, she would have influenced her and guided 
her; she might even have prevented her from precipitating 
a crisis. One would have thought Philibert would have 
availed himself of such aid. But no, that was not his 
idea. His idea was quite other. He wanted his mother to 
dislike his wife for reasons of his own, or, at any rate, he 
did not want any understanding intimacy to exist between 
the two. On the other hand he asked Claire to make friends 
with her and help him with her education. And he seemed 
content that Jane and Bianca should be friends. Was this 
because he knew Claire would never care for Jane, how¬ 
ever much she saw of her, and was afraid my mother 


104 Jane—Our Stranger 

might? I don’t know, I am not sure. There are aspects 
of the case that grow more obscure the more I think of 
them. 

As for Bianca—and Jane—that I learned about after¬ 
wards. 


IX 


C LAIRE was a person who attracted people to her 
in spite of herself, even those people whom she 
did not like. It had been so in the case of Jane. 
My sister charmed more often than not without wanting 
to do so. People in general were to her uninteresting and 
indiscriminate admiration annoyed her. She was constantly 
worried by having to snub would-be admirers who bored 
her. It was generally accepted in the family that she was 
the victim of her own charm, and we often half-laughingly 
commiserated with her. My mother once quite seriously 
said, “Cette pauvre Claire, with whom every one is in love 
and who cares for no one, it is really very tiring for her.” 

Jane’s devotion was to her from the first unwelcome, 
though dor a year or two she put up with it kindly enough. 
When Philibert asked her to help him with Jane’s education, 
she replied that she already had four children of her own 
to bring up, but she nevertheless let Jane go about with 
her, gave her advice about people and clothes, let her do 
errands for her; and in a mild way returned the girl’s demon¬ 
strations of affection, but it all bored and worried her. 
There was for her no pleasure in being adored by a young 
woman whom she found to be stupid. She did not on the 
whole care much for women, and often said she did not 
believe in their friendship. Her need of affection was 
abundantly supplied to her in her own family. Between 
her mother and her children she found all the tenderness 
she required; in society she asked merely to be amused. 
At bottom she was a confirmed cynic. Human nature ap¬ 
peared to her unsympathetic and pitiable. Her family 
represented for her a refuge from a world that disgusted 

i os 


io6 Jane—Our Stranger 

her more than it interested. There was for her something 
ultimate and absolute in the ties of blood that gave to the 
members of a family, all of them mere ordinary human 
beings, a special precious significance for each other. 
If she had ever analyzed it she would have said—“But of 
course I know that Marnan and Philibert and Blaise and 
Tante Marianne are no different from other people, but 
that does not matter, they are different for me. It’s not 
that I believe in my brothers as men, it’s that I believe in 
their relationship to me, and that, is the only thing I do 
believe in. Philibert may be the most selfish man in Paris; 
nevertheless he would not be selfish to me. That’s all, 
and that is enough. I don’t believe in men. I don’t believe 
in women. I don’t believe in myself or in love or happi¬ 
ness, but I believe in my family.” But of course she never 
did so express herself. She was not given to talking about 
herself. 

Philibert realized from the first that Claire was necessary 
to his scheme, and somehow or other he prevailed upon her 
to exert herself on his behalf. She was constantly at his 
house and became its chief ornament, and one of its most 
potent attractions. Jane had her place, usually at the top 
of the staircase, but Claire’s corner was the corner people 
looked for. Always more quietly dressed than any one else, 
(and I believe that Philibert planned the contrast of Jane’s 
gorgeous brocades with an eye to the dramatic effect of 
the two women) my sister created about her an atmosphere, 
a hush, a kind of breathless attention. I have seen her 
often appear in one of those great doorways, a slim, shadowy 
figure, in trailing grey draperies, and stand there silently 
while gradually her presence made itself felt, drew all eyes 
to her and created a feeling among the assembled people 
that a new charm, a finer quality, had been conveyed to 
the atmosphere by her being there. Wonderful Claire, 
clever Philibert; they played beautifully into each other’s 
hands. I do not mean that they were coldly calculating 
in regard to each other. On the contrary, their mutual ad- 


Jane—Our Stranger 107 

miration gave them, each one, the warmest affectionate 
glow. They rejoiced each in the rare qualities of the other, 
and Claire, knowing that in Philibert’s house she would 
find men worthy of appreciating her, knowing too, that no 
artist could so set off her full value as her brother, seemed 
unlike my mother to derive a certain amount of half-cynical 
amusement from what went on in that mansion. It is, of 
course, possible that at bottom she was no more averse to 
lunching “dans I’intimite” with royalties than was Mrs. Car¬ 
penter. In any event, princes of royal blood paid court to 
her in Philibert’s salons. And Philibert was right when 
he placed her beside him in that house. She made it 
comme il faut. Her presence was to it a benediction. 

It had taken three years to build Philibert’s palace, and 
by the time it was finished, Claire had prevailed upon her 
husband to move into Paris and buy there a very nice 
house of his own. On the whole, things had turned out 
for her better than any of us had expected. Six years of 
what he would have called I suppose conjugal bliss had 
tempered the ardour of my brother-in-law, who had to his 
wife’s immense relief begun to look elsewhere than in his 
home for his pleasures. Though she had never complained 
of her slavery and now never spoke of her freedom, we 
all knew what had happened and were relieved. My mother 
was delighted. “Endn, he hasn’t killed her,” was her way 
of expressing it to me. “The poor child is prettier than 
ever, and she manages so as not to be talked about.” What 
it was that she managed I had no reason for asking. If 
Claire was happy, if at last she had selected some one from 
among her numerous admirers whom she could love and 
who was beautifying her life for her, then all was well. 
I had no fault to find with her there. My mother’s reading 
of the case seemed to me the true one. My mother had 
suffered over her daughter’s marriage, and was glad to 
have some one make up to her child some part of the joy 
of life she deserved. 

All this was quite satisfactory. It never occurred to any 


io8 Jane—Our Stranger 

one of us to disapprove of Claire. How could we? Why 
should we? Had she done anything preposterous like run¬ 
ning away with a footman we should still have stood by 
her. As it was she remained one of the most admired 
women in Paris, and the least talked about, and her senti¬ 
mental life was for us a vague rather romantic secret realm 
which we took for granted and respected. We never pryed 
into her affairs, and when one day Philibert, in my mother’s 
drawing room, twitted Claire with the fact that her beauty 
increased in proportion to her husband’s infidelities, she 
merely laughed shyly and said nothing, knowing well enough 
that we expected no explanation. The episode would certainly 
have passed unnoticed, if Jane’s face had not shown it to be 
for her a moment of quite terrible revelation. It was, I re¬ 
member, on a Sunday afternoon. We had all been lunching 
with my mother, Philibert, Jane, Claire and I, and were sit¬ 
ting by the fire with our coffee cups. Philibert, with his coat¬ 
tails over his arms, standing on the hearthrug, had been 
quizzing me. He was in excellent spirits, having just brought 
off some one of his social coups—I think it was the Prince 
of Wales that week who had dined with him, and Philibert 
was particularly pleased with Claire. His little sally had 
been meant and received as a token of affection. Unfor¬ 
tunately he had forgotten Jane; or it may be that he had not 
forgotten her and had spoken deliberately. It is possible 
that he thought the time had come to carry her education a 
step further. He probably felt it tiresome to be always 
on his guard as to what he said in her presence for all 
the world as if she were a jeune fille. She had heard 
and continued to hear in the houses she frequented, enough 
talk of all kinds, heaven knows, to enlighten her as to 
the habits of our world, but for all that we had instinctively 
all of us in her presence been careful of what we said to 
each other. It was, I suppose, our tribute to her innocence, 
or perhaps even to our fear of her judgments. More than 
once I, for one, had stammered under the gaze of her can- 


Jane—Our Stranger 109 

did eyes and had swallowed the words that were on the tip 
of my tongue. On this occasion the phrase spoken would 
not have struck me as dangerous. I did not look at Jane 
to see how she took it. I merely happened to be facing 
her on the sofa and couldn’t help seeing the pallor that 
mantelled her face like a coating of wax. It was like that, 
not as if she had grown pale because of the ebbing of 
blood from her face, but as if a kind of coating of misery 
and fear had visibly enveloped her in whiteness. For a 
moment I did not understand, and failed to connect Phili¬ 
bert’s words with her aspect. “But, Jane,” I exclaimed, 
“what is it? Are you ill?” Fiercely she motioned me to 
be silent, gripping my arm with her strong hand so as to 
hurt me, and conveying somehow without speaking, for 
she could not speak, that she wanted me not to attract the 
attention of the others. Unfortunately Philibert had taken 
it all in. He may have been watching for the effect of his 
speech. His next words and his general behaviour give 
colour to such a theory. He literally jumped forward 
toward her across the carpet. 

“But, my poor child,” he cried out derisively, “don’t 
make up a face like that. It’s most unpleasant. Voyons, 
what a way to behave in your mother-in-law’s drawing¬ 
room. If I had known you were so stupid, I should have 
left you at home.” 

Those were his words. They were uttered with anima¬ 
tion, with an almost ferocious gaiety, and to accompany 
them he tweaked her playfully but not gently by the ear. 
I got up from my place beside her, feeling myself flush 
to my hair. I turned my back to get away from the sight 
of that cowering creature huddling back from the hand that 
held her. 

Exaggerated? Certainly she was exaggerated. Idiotic? 
Perhaps so. Understand her? Of course I didn’t. It was 
not until long after that I began to understand her. It 
was enough for me at that moment to understand Philibert 


no Jane—Our Stranger 

and perceive that never, even if she lived with him for 
twenty years and maintained intact the dignity of her 
honesty, would he respect her. 

Claire had been a passive spectator of this little passage 
between husband and wife. A slight flush had mounted to 
her cheek, a flush I took to be of annoyance, for she rose 
a moment later with more than usual abruptness and kissed 
my mother good-bye, ignoring completely the other two, 
not so much as looking at them as she made for the door. 
Jane, however, was too quick for her, and wrenching her¬ 
self free from Philibert, was upon her before she turned 
the door knob. 

“Don’t go like that,” she cried, “don’t be annoyed. I 
know he was joking. I know he did not mean it.” She 
seemed to be trying to grasp Claire in her arms, to get 
hold of her, to cling to her. I had a confused impression 
of something almost like a scuffle taking place between the 
two women, and of Claire actually throwing her off. I 
may be wrong. It may have been merely the expression 
on Claire’s face and the tone of her voice that sent Jane 
backwards. I don’t know, but it was quite pitifully horrid, 
and again I turned away my eyes, and with my back to them 
heard Claire say in her coldest tone, and God knows how 
cold her lovely voice can be— 

“Ne soyez pas grotesque, je vous en prie. Laissez-moi 
partir.” 

I do not mean to suggest that I sympathized with Jane 
that afternoon, for I did not. It was all too absurdly out 
of proportion. She had created out of nothing, out of 
the blue, a scene in my mother’s drawing-room, and one 
had only to look at the little delicate crowded place to know 
that scenes were abhorrent there. I believe actually that 
a small table full of trinkets had been overturned in Jane’s 
rush for the door, and I know that a coffee-cup was broken. 
It was the sort of thing one simply never had conceived of. 
My mother’s nerves were very much upset, and when Jane 
turned to her after Claire had shut the door in her face, 


111 


Jane—Our Stranger 

wanting to beg her pardon, Maman could only wave her 
hands before a twitching face and say, “No, no, my child. 
Don’t say any more, it is enough for today/’ 

After that I did not see Jane for some weeks. Neither 
she nor Philibert came to lunch with my mother the follow¬ 
ing Sunday, nor the Sunday after. On the third Sunday 
Philibert came alone and explained briefly that Jane was 
indisposed. He seemed preoccupied. He talked little, ate 
nothing, and drank a number of glasses of wine as if 
he were very thirsty. His lips twitched constantly, form¬ 
ing themselves into a kind of snarl, and he was continually 
jerking the ends of his moustaches. I remember thinking 
that he looked for all the world as if he wanted to bite 
some one. He had never appeared more cruel. I began 
to have a sickening foreboding. Claire eyed him strangely. 
I wondered if she had something of my feeling. How I 
wished she had! 

It all came out after luncheon. He could not contain 
himself. He was beside himself with exasperation. Jane’s 
stupidity was too colossal. He could not put up with being 
loved like that any longer. She had made him a scene after 
the absurd affair of the other day and had asked him to 
swear that he would never be unfaithful to her. Here he 
raised his eyebrows, hunched his shoulders and threw out 
his hands. It was incredible how she had gone on. She 
had said that she had been thinking over his remark to 
Claire and was frightened by it, that when he had spoken 
so lightly of his brother-in-law’s infidelities it had come to 
her as a tremendous shock that such a thing was possible. 
An abyss had opened before her—that was her word. How 
could Claire go on living with a man who was unfaithful? 
She could not understand. What did he mean by her sis¬ 
ter’s growing more beautiful in proportion to her husband’s 
infidelities? Had he meant anything, or was it only a 
joke? Did Claire know her husband made love to other 
women? She loved Claire, she thought her wonderful, 
but she didn’t understand. And so on and so on. 


I 12 


Jane—Our Stranger 

Philibert recited it all to us. His voice grew shriller 
and shriller. He piled up phrase after phrase in a cre¬ 
scendo of exasperation until he burst into a loud laugh with 
the words—“She talks, she talks of our marrigae being 
made in Heaven.” He grasped his head in his hands. 

Claire’s face wore a sneer. 

“She professes not to know then, how it was her mother 
made it?” she asked. 

Philibert came as it were to a halt. He looked at us all 
one after another. His face was of a sudden impudent, 
cool, smooth. He began to explain lucidly. 

“Imagine to yourself, she really did not know it. She 
believed it was a love match. She believed it till yester¬ 
day, I mean last night, or it may be it was this morning, 
I don’t remember looking at the time. Anyhow, as she 
wouldn’t let me sleep I told her. I told her all about it.” 

“I don’t believe she didn’t know,” said Claire. 

He took her up quickly. “There, my dear, you are wrong, 
and you miss the whole meaning of her boring character.” 
He was enjoying himself now, was my brother, dissecting a 
human being was one of his favourite pastimes. In the 
pleasure it now afforded him to analyze Jane, he forgot 
for the moment his personal annoyance. 

“One must remember,” he mused, “that she is a savage, 
with the mentality of a Huguenot minister. If you could 
hear her talk of the sacrament of marriage! She is of a 
solemnity, and her ideals, Mon Dieu! what ideals! She 
once said to me that her grandfather loved her grandmother 
at the day of his death just in the same way that he loved 
her on the day of her wedding. When I replied ‘How 
very disgusting’ she merely stared and left the room. She 
is always quoting her grandmother and her Aunt Patty. 
What a background—I ask you? St. Mary’s Plains! It 
would appear that in St. Mary’s Plains they always marry 
for love and live together in endless monotony. Faith¬ 
fulness—she is in love with faithfulness; purity too, she 
thinks a great deal of purity. In fact she has a most un- 


Jane—Our Stranger 113 

pleasant set of theories. They fill up her brain. There 
is no room for reality. What goes on before her eyes 
means nothing to her. No, Claire, you are wrong. She 
knew nothing of her mother’s bargaining with me for her 
little life. Believe it or not, it is true. She married me 
for myself and believed the good God sent me to her, and 
my revelations were a shock. Impossible she should have 
simulated the emotion they caused her. The finest actress 
in the world could not have done it. I admit that as a 
piece of acting it would have been a fine performance. On 
the stage I would have enjoyed it, but in one’s own bedroom, 
the conjugal bedroom—ugh! no.” 

“What did she do?” asked Claire. 

“She leaned up against the wall, face to the wall, I mean, 
flattened against it, her hands high above her head, palms 
on the wall, too, as if she were reaching up to the ceiling.” 

“I don’t see anything wonderful in that.” 

“It was a fine picture,” said Philibert. “But she stayed 
there too long. She stayed like that some minutes. In 
fact I went on talking for a long time to that image, that 
long back and those outstretched arms. It reminded one 
of a crucifixion, modern interpretation. I was not sure that 
she was not dying and expected her to fall backwards.” 

My mother had been fussing nervously with her shawl, 
her sleeves, her hair, giving herself little pats and tugs and 
looking this way and that. Her face was drawn and work¬ 
ing. She kept moistening her lips and saying—“Is it pos¬ 
sible ? Is it possible ?” She now broke in and cried plain¬ 
tively— 

“But, my son, all this is terrible. I do not understand. 
What was it you told her?” 

“I told her quite simply, mother dear, that I had married 
her for her money, that I had managed it all with Mrs. 
Carpenter before I had ever seen her; (Old Izzy is done 
for with Jane now, I am afraid, but that can’t be helped) 
that I was tired of making love to her and would be grate¬ 
ful if she would become less exacting.” 


114 Jane—Our Stranger 

“Mon Dieu, Mon Dieu!” wailed my mother. “Was it 
necessary to do anything so definite? Couldn’t you have 
gradually— endn, does one say such things?” 

“No, one does not, not in a civilized world, but Jane 
isn’t civilized. You’ve no idea what it is with her.” 

Claire had risen and wandered away to the window with 
her usual drifting nonchalance. 

“Et apres?” she asked over her shoulder. “What did she 
say afterwards, when you had finished?” 

“She said nothing, she fell down in a swoon.” 

“Backwards?” 

“No, she had turned and was standing with her back to 
the wall and her hands against it, leaning forward and glar¬ 
ing, rather like a tiger, ready to spring when I had finished. 
But she didn’t spring. When I mentioned a certain eve¬ 
ning before our marriage on which I had taken her to the 
Opera, the queer light went out of her eyes. It was like 
snuffing out a candle. Then she fainted. I had to call 
her maid. It was two hours before she came round. She 
faints as she does eveything else, too much, too much. 
Quel temperament, tout de meme. You have no idea what 
it is to live with her—and at the same time so fastidious. 
Certain things she won’t put up with. Professes a horror 
of—of the refinements of sentiment. A prude and a pas - 
sionnee. Ah, it is all too difficult. Anyhow, it is finished, 
thank God for that.” 

At this Maman wailed out—“Finished? What do you 
mean, finished?” 

Philibert laughed. “I only mean that she won’t bother 
me any more; not that she’ll leave me. Ah, no, she won’t 
leave me.” He ruminated; after a moment: he sighed. 
“And I may be wrong, she may bother me after all, in a 
new way, in a new way. She is very obstinate. She may 
try to make me love her, now that she knows I don’t. It 
all depends on whether she hates me or not. One never can 
tell. And, of course, she knows nothing but what I have 
told you. It never occurs to her that I could be like other 


Jane—Our Stranger 115 

men. Even now she doesn’t suppose that her husband is 
unfaithful, and even now I imagine that fact will be of 
some importance to her. It is all very curious. I have 
told you in order to warn you. It is quite possible that 
she will come to you for help.” 

He pulled down his cuffs, twisted his moustaches into 
place, looked at himself in the glass over the chimney piece, 
and bent over my mother, kissing the top of her head. 

“Au revoir, Maman cherie. Don’t let her worry you. 
Just quiet her down a little. But if it tires you to see her, 
of course you needn’t. I only suggest it for her sake, and 
for us all. She will settle down. Au revoir.” 

He went to Claire and spoke to her in an undertone. I 
saw her shake her head. “Non” I heard her say. “Je 
ne peux pas. Tout cela mecceure. Elle est vraiment trop 
bete.” He shrugged his shoulders. For me he had no 
word of instruction, nor any of good-bye. From the win¬ 
dow I watched him cross the pavement to his limousine. 
For a moment he stood, one patent leather foot on the step 
of the car, talking to his footman and arranging as he did 
so the white camelia in his buttonhole. His face was bland. 
His top-hat had a wonderful sheen. We all knew where he 
was going. Bianca had returned to Paris after a six 
months sojourn in Italy and had refused to go back to her 
husband. The connection for us was obvious. We had been 
aware for some time of the renewed intimacy of these two. 

Philibert waved his gloves at me through the window of 
his limousine and grinned. A new light dawned on me. It 
had all been a comedy. He had done it on purpose. Bianca 
had put him up to it. If it had not been for Bianca, he would 
never have precipitated a crisis with Jane. All that about 
her affection being insufferable was nonsense. It was in 
his interest that his wife should adore him, and no one 
when left to himself could look after his own interests so 
well as Philibert. In quarelling with Jane he had done 
something from his own point of view incredibly foolish. 
Had Bianca not interfered he would never have done it. 


ii6 Jane—Our Stranger 

But what was she up to? That was the question. How 
should I know? Who on earth could ever tell what Bianca 
had hidden away in that intriguing Italian mind of hers? 
That she meant no good to any one, of that I was certain. 

When I turned away from the window, Claire was strok¬ 
ing my mother’s hand. She looked at me inimically. 
Something in my face must have betrayed me, though I 
said nothing. “Don’t ask me to sympathize with Jane,” 
she brought out, “for I can’t. I wash my hands ot the 
whole affair.” 

My mother’s look was kinder than Claire's. Her eyes 
held that proud plaintive sweetness that denied all passion, 
either of anger, reproach, or pity. Her face was very 
white and her eyelids reddened, but her remark was char¬ 
acteristic. 

“She has her own mother to go to, and her own mother 
to thank if she is unhappy.” 

And with that she drew me down to her with one of her 
beautiful gestures, and kissed me. I must have been in a 
highly excited and unnatural state of mind by this time, 
for the rare caress, so often awaited in vain, aroused in me 
at that moment a vague suspicion. Was she too, I remem¬ 
ber asking myself, afraid I would try to get her to help 
poor Jane? If so her fears were unnecessary. Jane did 
not go to them. Philibert had been mistaken in thinking 
that she would rush to them for help. The time was to 
come when they would go to her, but of that later. She 
spoke to no one of her trouble, and neither Claire nor my 
mother laid eyes on her for months. We heard later that 
she had gone to Joigny with Genevieve, her little girl. She 
stayed at the Chateau de Sainte Clothilde all summer alone. 
Long afterwards I found out that she had not even so much 
as spoken to her own mother. Jane never reproached Mrs. 
Carpenter, never opened her lips on the subject to any one, 
until the other day when she told me everything. Poor old 
Izzy died the following winter, in ignorance of what her 
daughter thought about it all. 


X 


I AM no fatalist. I do not believe that the good God has 
ordered to be written down in a book what all the 
millions of little souls on the earth are to be doing this 
day a year hence. He, no doubt, in his wisdom has a gen¬ 
eral idea of such coming events as famines, earthquakes, 
wars and pestilences, but man must remain full of surprises 
for his Maker; his activities are incalculable, and tiny cir¬ 
cumstances, the effect of his minute will, have a way of 
spoiling the fine large trend of the great cumulative power 
of the past that we call fate. It is true that such characters 
as Bianca and Philibert have about them the quality of the 
inevitable. Certainly, as compared to Jane, they were not 
free people. They were the children of an old and elab¬ 
orate civilization, and impelled by obscure impulses that 
they themselves never recognized and that had their source 
in some dim dark poisonous pocket of the past. 

Bianca, more than any women I have ever known, seemed 
fated to be what she was and to do as she did. She appears 
to me now as I remember her as the little white slave of 
the powers of darkness. But she liked her darkness. 
She dipped into it deeper and deeper. She sank of her 
own will and because of her own morbid and insatiable 
curiosity. 

But Jane was free. One had only to be in her presence 
to feel it. No morbid complexes in her, one would have 
said. Compared to her we were like so many pigmies in 
chains, and Bianca beside Jane was like a ghost or a woman 
walking in her sleep. Of course Bianca hated Jane. I 
don’t believe in their friendship. As it was, I found it 
disgusting of Philibert to let Jane go about with Bianca. 

ii 7 


ii8 Jane—Our Stranger 

And Bianca must have been pretending to care for Jane out 
of perversity. Their natures were as antipathetic as their 
looks were opposed. Bianca with her little snow-white vi¬ 
cious face, so white that it showed pale bluish lights and 
shadows, her eccentric emaciated elegance of body, her enor¬ 
mous blue eyes fringed by their thick eyelashes that were 
like bushes and that she plastered with black till they 
stuck together: Jane, magnificent young animal, strong child 
amazon, towering shyly above us, looking down on us with 
her serious wistful gaze, holding out her marvellous hands 
to Bianca, suspicious of nothing, wanting to be friends— 
Jane insists that they cared for each other—I can’t admit 
it. Of course Bianca hated her, and the fact that until 
she saw Jane’s hands she had seen no others so beautiful 
as her own made it no easier for Jane, for Bianca may have 
been a priestess of the occult powers of darkness, she was 
as well a vain and envious young woman. A cat, Fan 
Ivanoff called her simply. 

On the other hand I believe that if Paris had not mixed 
itself up in the long duel between these two women it might 
have ended less tragically, at any rate less tragically for 
Jane. Had they lived in London or Moscow or New York 
it would have been different. They would not have been 
so conspicuous. The vast and impersonal life of a great 
community would have absorbed them. But Paris held 
them close and watched them. It held them for twenty 
years. If they went away for a time they always came 
back and met face to face and could not get away from each 
other, for Paris is small and Paris is more personal than 
any city in the world. It is a spoiled beauty, excessively 
interested in personalities. I speak now of Paris, the lovely 
capricious creature that has existed for centuries, that has 
kept the special quality of its bland sparkling beauty through 
invasions, revolutions and massacres, and is still elegant 
under the dominion of the most bourgeois of governments. 
I speak of the Paris that seems to me to possess a soul, 
the soul of an immortal yet mortal woman, seductive 


Jane—Our Stranger 119 

pliable, submissive and indestructible. Do I sound fantas¬ 
tic ? I have communed with my city for years, at 
night and in the morning and at mid-day. I have been a 
lonely man wandering through its streets and it has con¬ 
fided to me its secrets. Most often at night, when all the 
little people that inhabit its houses are asleep, I have listened, 
and like a sigh breathing up from its silvery bosom, I have 
heard its voice and understood its whispered confidences 
that carry a lament for days that are gone and are full of 
the tales of its many amours. Ah, my worldly-wise beauty, 
mistress of a hemisphere, what you do not know of men 
is indeed not worth knowing. And still they come, 
covetous, lustful, enamoured. What crimes have they not 
committed, what birthrights not denied, what fortunes not 
wasted, what fatherlands not repudiated, to win your fa¬ 
vour? 

It was this Paris that took part in the affair of Jane 
and Bianca. Why not? How could it have done other¬ 
wise? It has always been attracted by intrigue. It has 
a taste for drama. I repeat it dotes on personality; any 
personality that is striking, that catches its attention. The 
type matters little. Having long ago substituted taste for 
morals it has no ethical prejudices. It does not dislike a 
bandit; it adores a farceur such as Philibert. It delights 
in demagogues and artists and men of intelligence whether 
they are criminals or saints. Once in a hundred years, like 
a woman surfeited with pleasure and sensation, it will re¬ 
spect a person of character. 

Bianca and Philibert were true children of Paris. They 
were its spoiled and petted darlings and they knew this 
and laid store by it. At bottom it was Paris that Philibert 
was continually making love to. He had a quite inordinate 
liking for his city, a jealous proprietory affection. I be¬ 
lieve that had he been exiled from it, he would have died, 
and I believe that his desire to curry favour with it was the 
motive of most of his actions. It was for Paris that he 
gave his wonderful parties and concocted his fanciful amuse- 


120 


Jane—Our Stranger 

merits. He treated it literally as if it were his mistress. 
He cajoled, he flattered, he bullied, he caressed, and he spent 
on it millions, Jane’s millions. It was not merely an ordi¬ 
nary vanity that impelled him. He saw himself as the 
benevolent despot of Paris, its favourite lover and its pro¬ 
tector. To add to its brilliance he enticed to it princes and 
celebrities from every country of Europe. Europe was to 
him nothing more than a field to be exploited for the amuse¬ 
ment of Paris. He would have beheld every city in Ger¬ 
many, Austria, Russia or Italy razed to the ground without 
a twinge of regret or horror, but when in 1914 the Germans 
were marching on Paris, then he was like a man possessed. 
I can remember him, white to the lips, rushing in from 
Army Headquarters to see the Archbishop. He had had 
long before any one else the idea of piling sandbags round 
Notre Dame to protect the stained glass windows. He was 
like a maniac. 

As for Bianca, she was unique and Paris wore her like a 
jewel. The fact that she was half Italian seemed strangely 
enough not to mitigate against her, though her mother, the 
wonderful bacchante who had become in memory a legend¬ 
ary figure, had found it at first none too easy to please, 
according to Aunt Clothilde. The Venetian had been a 
woman of quick passions and child-like humours. She was 
remembered for her many love affairs, the garlands of 
bright flowers she wore in her hair, and the habit she had 
of sticking pins into little wax effigies of people she wished 
would die. An impulsive, playful, improvident creature, 
with the beauty of a peasant and the naivete of a child. 
She had died when Bianca was a child of six, died of 
home-sickness so they said, for her beloved Italy. I don’t 
know, I imagine that Franqois her husband had something 
to answer for there. It was said that he had found a wax 
effigy of himself in her room, containing no less than three 
hundred pins, and had laughed delightedly. He was a cyni¬ 
cal devil. Aunt Clo says that he used to lock up his wife 
in their dismal chateau in Provence and keep her on bread 


121 


Jane—Our Stranger 

and water for days at a time. In any case he did not lock 
up Bianca, nor did Bianca seem to have inherited any of 
her mother’s aptitude for getting into scrapes. One could 
not easily detect in her the Italian strain, one only noticed 
that she was a little different from French women, with a 
different timbre of voice and an occasional mannerism evoca¬ 
tive of something foreign, something lazy and sly and mys¬ 
terious, and if she had inherited secret affinities with that 
warm romantic southern country of intrigue and supersti¬ 
tion, she kept them hidden, together with all manner of 
other things, strange things, violent obsessions, curious 
tastes, dark obscure desires, and knowledge of a dangerous 
kind. She chose to appear at this time, I allude to the pe¬ 
riod covering the first years of Jane’s marriage to Philibert, 
as merely the supreme expression of the elegant world of 
Paris. 

It is curious to watch the rise and fall of women in 
society. Women loom on the horizon; suddenly for 
no apparent reason. A gold mine, a rubber plantation, 
a motor-industry, suddenly looms into prominence. It 
takes the fancy, it is advertised, it becomes popular, peo¬ 
ple buy shares in it, the shares go higher and higher, the 
rush to buy becomes a scramble, and then perhaps a fraud 
is discovered, there is a collapse, and a large number of 
people find they have been expensively fooled. So it is in 
society. Women loom on the horizon; suddenly for no 
apparent reason they take the popular fancy. Compara¬ 
tively plain women or women we have all known for years 
and have considered insignificant, become all at once con¬ 
spicuous and important. Some one calls her, the plain 
woman, a beauty. Some one else repeats it. People be¬ 
come curious. They look at her with a new interest. A 
number of men who were before indifferent to her charms 
begin to pay her marked attention. The boom begins. 
Every one agrees that they have heretofore been mistaken. 
Her nose is not a snub nose. She is a beauty. It is whis¬ 
pered that so-and-so is tres emballe. She is the success 


122 Jane—Our Stranger 

of the season. And after, when her day is over, she still 
retains something, once having been acclaimed a beauty she 
remains a beauty. Only the men who dubbed her nose 
Grecian look at it now with the same indifference that it 
inspired when they called it “snub;” They have been en¬ 
gaged in a little flurry in the social stock market. They do 
not admit having been fooled, but being inveterate gam¬ 
blers they turn their attention elsewhere. The boom of the 
gold-mine is over, they go in for rubber. The men, i. e. 
the gamblers, are always the same in these affairs; it is 
the women who come and go. 

Bianca was not one of these. She was no shooting star 
in the social heaven, she was a fixture, the little central 
shining constellation in a firmament of lesser planets. As 
a child she had been an institution. Strangers were taken 
to the Bois to look at the beautiful little girl, who, all in 
white, white fur coat and white gaiters, and followed by 
a white pom, walked there with her governess. She never 
sought the favour of Paris. She laid her will upon it and 
it submitted. As she grew older she made few women 
friends and tolerated no rivals. She was nice to old men 
and old ladies, people like my mother adored her, but most 
young women were afraid of her. Jane was an exception. 
Jane loved her. The two as I say used to go about to¬ 
gether. The intimacy was shocking to me—I loathed Phil¬ 
ibert for allowing it. 

Jane had no suspicions. Her confidence in Philibert was 
such as to make us as a family quite nervous. What 
would she do, we asked ourselves, when she found out? 
Paris took little account of Jane. After the first flurry of 
excitement over her wedding, it lost sight of her. She dis¬ 
appeared behind Philibert. Curious how such a little man 
could hide from view a woman so much bigger than him¬ 
self. It was a case of perspective. He stood in the fore¬ 
ground. To the more distant public she was invisible; to 
those who came nearer she appeared as nothing more in¬ 
teresting than a large fine piece of furniture. Philibert 


Jane—Our Stranger 123 

sometimes in moments of good humour alluded to her as 
his Byzantine Madonna. 

I should defeat my own object in telling this story if I 
did not do Philibert justice. Yet how do him justice? If 
he were a centipede or a rare species of bird my task would 
be easier. But he lived on the earth in the guise of a hu¬ 
man being, and he was not quite a human being. And it 
is difficult to be just to a brother such as Philibert. He 
always loathed the sight of me. I don’t blame him for 
that. I loathe the sight of myself. I am an ugly 
object. But Philibert found it amusing to hate me 
and to make me constantly aware of my deformity. My 
twisted frame seemed to produce in him a kind of itching 
frenzy, to tickle him to dreadful laughter, to irritate him 
to nervous cruelty. And I was unfortunately never able 
to grow a thick enough skin to protect me from him. 

I suppose that I have always been jealous of Philibert. 
I loved life, but it pushed me aside. I wanted it, I wanted 
it in all its fulness, but it was Philibert who had it. And 
my incapacity to taste so many of its pleasures has only 
made me regard it with a closer, more wistful attention. 
I was like a ragamuffin in the street with his nose plas¬ 
tered against the pastry-cook’s window, a ragamuffin who 
dreamed that his pockets were full of gold, but who always 
found that the bright coins he jingled so lovingly in his 
fingers were not accepted over the counter. After repeated 
rebuffs, I gave up trying to get anything, but I could not 
take my eyes from the feast and so, even in my childhood, 
I resorted to the fiction of considering myself an invisible 
spectator of other people’s doings, and I helped along this 
little game by sitting as much as possible in dark corners 
or behind the kindly screen of some large piece of furni¬ 
ture such as the schoolroom piano. All that I asked of 
the world that so prodigiously attracted my interest was that 
it should not notice me, and thus leave me free to notice it, 
and I came at last to feel when some one out of kindness or 
cruelty dragged me out of my corner, a sense of outrage. 


124 Jane—Our Stranger 

So it was when Philibert, taking me by my collar, exposed 
me to kicks and to laughter. So it was years later when 
Jane, taking me by the hand, exposed me to the responsibili¬ 
ties of a friendship that demanded action. I used to dodge 
Philibert when I could. I would have avoided Jane’s con¬ 
fidence had I" been able. Phi.Ubert’s tormenting in no way 
involved me. I could just let him kick and was when he 
finished as free as before to subside into my comer; with 
Jane it was different. Jane involved me in everything. 

And now that I am obliged to think of my own personal 
relation to Jane, I have as I do so, a feeling of pain that 
is like the throbbing of some old hurt or the recurrence of 
an illness. Jane was magnificent and healthy and whole. 
She was half a head taller than I. I am cursed with a visu¬ 
alizing mind. As I set myself to the business of remember¬ 
ing her life, I see her constantly moving before my eyes, 
visibly acting out her drama, and I see myself, a wizened 
little man looking up at her from a distance. I have an acute 
sense of an opportunity lost for ever, of precious time wasted. 
For years I refused to sympathize with her as her friend. 
For years I would not talk to her because I was afraid she 
would complain to me of my family. How little I knew 
her! 

Slowly she imposed herself. Like a woman coming 
towards me in a fog, I saw her grow more clear and more 
definite, until at last I recognized her for what she was. 

Was I merely in love with her? Was it that? Was that 
all? If so she never suspected it. If so I did not recognize 
the feeling. It is, of course, the accusation my brother 
brought against me. He spoke of my criminal passion for 
his wife. It is very curious. The cleverest men are some¬ 
times very obtuse. Philibert’s intelligence was of the kind 
that made it impossible for him to understand simple things. 

In love with Jane? I find that I have no idea what the 
phrase means and cannot apply it. It is as if I were trying 
to fit a little paper pattern to a cloud floating off there in the 
heaven. My tenderness for Jane does remind me a little of a 


Jane—Our Stranger 125 

cloud. It has changed so often in shape and hue. At times 
it has seemed to me a little white floating thing of celestial 
brightness, at others it has enveloped me in darkness and al¬ 
ways it has been intangible, vague, unlinked to the earth. 

And yet, even to me, she did seem at first very queer. 
It seemed to me that she was really too different to be inno¬ 
cent of all desire to make trouble. She often annoyed me 
by remaining so silent when any one else would have burst 
out with a flood of protest, and by going pale as death when 
a moderate flush ought to have expressed a sufficient sense 
of disturbance. The excessive emotional restraint evidenced 
by those sudden mute pallors of hers used to worry me with 
their exaggeration. I understood how this sort of thing 
displeased my mother. I can remember moments when I 
expected to see her bound across the room and go crushing 
through the mirror, so tense was her physical stillness. 
Claire used to look at her then with lifted eyebrows and 
turn away with a nervous shrug of impatient disdain. I felt 
with Claire. I understood this sort of thing little better than 
she did. We were accustomed to people whose gestures were 
used to enhance the fine finished meaning of spoken phrases, 
not to dumb creatures whose eyes and quivering nostrils and 
long strong contracted fingers betrayed them in drawing 
rooms. I, caught up in the fine web of my family’s prej¬ 
udices, had found myself from the midst of those delicate 
meshes seeing her as they saw her, as some gorgeous danger¬ 
ous animal who was tearing the very fabric of their system 
to pieces with its many gyrations. As I say, I doubted her 
innocence. I suppose like every one else in the family I was 
affected by the glare Mrs. Carpenter’s obvious ambition 
threw over her. It didn’t seem to me possible that Jane had 
married Philibert simply and solely because he fascinated 
her. Not that I didn’t know Philibert to be capable of fas¬ 
cinating any one he wanted to, but because such fascinations 
had never seemed to me to contain in themselves any basis 
for marriage. The truth involved too great a stretch for 
my imagination. I had to find it out gradually. It necessi- 


126 Jane—Our Stranger 

tated too, the admission on my part that for Jane the name of 
Joigny counted for absolutely nothing. I couldn’t be sup¬ 
posed to know that Jane didn’t care a straw about marrying 
our family, when her mother so obviously laid great store 
by her doing so. 

But I started to explain Philibert, and suddenly it comes 
to me; I believe that at the bottom of everything he did was 
the controlling impulse of his hatred of life. Undeniably he 
despised humanity. It exasperated him to tears. Its stu¬ 
pidity put him in a nervous frenzy. He was animated by 
a kind of rage of mockery. Everything that humanity 
cherished was to him anathema. He had been born with a 
distaste for all that men as a rule called goodness, and was 
nervously impelled towards that which they called evil. And 
yet the evil he courted didn’t do him any harm. I mean that 
it didn’t wear him out or spoil his digestion or stupefy his 
intelligence. On the contrary it agreed with him. He had 
begun to taste of life with the palate of a worn out old man. 
The good bread and butter and milk of the sweetness of 
life was repulsive to him and disagreed with him. He could 
live to be a hundred on a moral diet that would have killed 
in a week a child of nature. Sophistication can go no fur¬ 
ther. His equipment was complete, and he had, I suppose, 
no choice. His nature was imposed on him at birth. His 
punishment was that he lived alone in a world that bored him 
to extinction. 

Seriously, he appears to me now, as I think of him, as a 
man living under a curse. I believe him to have been 
haunted by a sense of unreality. To get in contact with 
something and feel it up against him, that was one of the ob¬ 
jects that obscurely impelled him. His extravagances of 
conduct were efforts to arrive at the primitive sensation of 
being alive. He did not know this. He only knew that he 
hated everything sooner or later. He was conscious merely 
of an irritating desire for sensation and amusement. His 
fear was that he would run through all pleasure before he 
died and find nothing left for him to do. It may have oc- 


Jane—Our Stranger 127 

curred to him at times that the world minus human interest 
did not provide endless sources of amusement. The things 
one could do to distract oneself were not after all so very 
many. Even vice has alas, its limitations, and it was not as 
if he were really in himself vicious. He had an absolute 
incapacity for forming habits good or bad. Could he have 
saddled himself with one or two the problem would have 
been simpler. Could he have become a drunkard how many 
hours would have been accounted for! If women had 
only had an indisputable power over him, what a relief to 
let himself go. But no. He was the victim of no malady 
and no craving. Drink as he might, his head remained ex¬ 
cruciatingly clear, debauch himself as much as he would, he 
remained master of his passions, and day after day, year 
after year, he was obliged to plan what he would do with 
himself. 

He found in the world only one kindred spirit. Bianca 
was the one creature on earth who was a match for him. 
She was more, and he knew it; she was in his own line his 
superior. Many people have been astonished at Philibert’s 
liaison with Bianca. They have considered the intimacy of 
these two people strange. I believe that Philibert’s feeling 
for Bianca was as simple as the feeling of a good man for a 
good woman, and as inevitable as if he and she were the only 
two white people in a world of black men. I believe that 
Philibert turned to Bianca in despair and clung to her out 
of loneliness. He and she were alone on the earth, as alone 
as if they had been gods condemned to live among men. 
She was his mate, moulded in the marvellous infernal mould 
that suited him. Voila tout. 

But she was a more refined instrument than he was. She 
filtered experience through a finer sieve. She had a steadier 
hand. Piers was the great advantage of being able to wait 
for her amusement and her effects. She was economical of 
her material. Philibert was afraid of running through the 
whole of experience and exhausting too soon the resources 
of life. Bianca was not afraid of anything, not even of be- 


128 Jane—Our Stranger 

ing bored. She meted out pleasure with deliberation. She 
calculated her capital with fine precision, she measured the 
future with a centimetre rule, and poured out sensation into 
a spoon, sipping it slowly. 

Philibert was a spendthrift. Bianca was as close as a 
peasant woman. And on the whole Philibert was honest. 
He did not try to deceive the world. He was too impatient 
and despised it too much. When he fooled it he did so 
openly and if people found him out he laughed. But Bianca 
was deep as a well and as secretive as death. What Phili¬ 
bert was so he appeared, but no one knew what Bianca was. 

During the summer that Jane spent alone at Joigny with 
her child, Philibert and Bianca saw a great deal of each other. 
Bianca had musical evenings that summer, in her garden, 
and little midnight suppers that were quite another variety 
of gathering. Philibert never drank too much at these sup¬ 
pers, neither did Bianca; as much cannot be said of some 
of the others, if Philibert’s own account of these graceful 
orgies was true. It was at one of them that poor Fan 
Ivanoff’s husband threw a glass of champagne in her 
face, cutting her cheek. Neither Fan nor her wretched Rus¬ 
sian were asked again. Bianca did not like that sort of 
thing. 

Jane has told me that she did not go to America that sum¬ 
mer because she hoped that Philibert would come to her at 
Joigny. She had found it impossible after the first shock 
of his revelations to believe that they were true. She told 
herself that he had been carried away by one of his fine 
frenzies of talk and had said things he had not meant. It 
was incredible to her that he should really mean that he 
cared nothing for her. He had, to her mind, given her dur¬ 
ing those years of marriage too many proofs to the contrary. 
Thinking it over alone she came to the conclusion that there 
was some mystery here that only time would make clear to 
her, and she therefore determined to wait. For a month, 
for two months, for three, she believed he would come and 
if not explain, at least put things on some decent footing, 


Jane—Our Stranger 129 

but he did . not come for the simple reason that Bianea 
wouldn’t let him. 

One has only to stop a moment and remember what he 
had at stake to realize the extent of Bianca’s power over 
him. He was entirely dependent on Jane for money. There 
was no settlement of any kind and he had none of his own. 
With her enormous income pouring through his hands, he 
had not a penny to show if she left him, and when people 
accused him later, as some did, of having put aside a portion 
of that revenue for himself they were wrong. His code of 
ethics, morals, what you will, his idea anyway, of what was 
permitted and what was not, allowed him to spend all her 
income and even run into debt; but not keep any of it for 
the future. It did not shock him in the least to spend Jane’s 
dollars on his various mistresses but it would have disgusted 
him to find any of these coins sticking to his palms. As 
long as he poured them out he was satisfied with himself; 
had he hoarded it he would have been ashamed. 

In any case he knew the risk he ran, for he understood 
Jane, and knew that the fear of scandal would not keep her 
if she once decided to break with him. Nor could he have 
diminished the magnitude of the catastrophe that this would 
mean. His sensational reign had only begun, but it had al¬ 
ready become vital to his happiness—I use the word happi¬ 
ness, for lack of another. He had done great things, but 
nothing as yet to compare with what he intended to do. The 
fame of his entertainments had already reached the different 
capitals of Europe, he had seen to that, but this was mere 
advertisement, preparatory work necessary to the realization 
of his ultimate purpose. He was in the position of a com¬ 
pany promoter who had sent out his circulars and gathered 
in a certain amount of capital, but had not yet founded his 
business, and was still far from holding the monopoly he 
aimed at. He was certain of success but he must have time. 
If his plans miscarried now he would be his own swindler. 

Jane, he realized perfectly, felt little interest in his schemes. 
It was one of the grudges he had against her. Her atti- 


130 Jane—Our Stranger 

tude from the first had been galling in its simplicity. When 
on the eve of their marriage he had proposed to her building 
a house, she had suggested that perhaps one of the beauti¬ 
ful old ones already existing in Paris might do, but on his 
insisting that none could compare with the image he had in 
his mind, she had given in with a sweetness and promptness 
that had taken his breath away. It is characteristic of him, 
in this connection, that though he wanted his own way and 
intended to get it, his pleasure in doing so would have been 
very much greater had she made it more difficult. Her plia¬ 
bility seemed to him stupid and when she merely said, look¬ 
ing over the plans he proudly spread out before her, some 
weeks later, “It’s dreadfully big, but if you like it I shall,” 
he came near to gnashing his teeth. It was equally galling 
to him neither to impress her nor to anger her, but he was 
obliged to contain himself, for after all, as he put it to 
Claire, he couldn’t go and tear the thing up just to spite him¬ 
self. She would calmly have put the bits in the waste-paper 
basket. 

When it came to arranging the house she had said —“1 
want one room at the top for my own. No one is to go 
there. I shall arrange it myself,” and the rest she left to him. 
I believe he never entered that room and never knew what 
she had done to it. If he thought about it at all, he doubt¬ 
less thought she had arranged it as a chapel. He probably 
imagined an altar and candles and photographs of the dead. 
Jane never told him about it. Some obscure instinct of 
mistrust must have been at the bottom of her shyness. She 
had furnished it quite simply like a room in the Grey House 
in St. Mary’s Plains. Her Aunt Patty had sent her a rock¬ 
ing chair, an old mahogany dresser, the window curtains from 
her old room, and some of her special belongings that she 
had left behind when she came away. It was the strangest 
room at the top of that mansion. I remember well the day 
Jane took me to it. She had come in from some function 
and was looking more worldly than usual. I remember gaz¬ 
ing beyond her outstretched silken arm with its jade brace- 


Jane—Our Stranger 13 i 

lets into what seemed to me the most pathetic of sanctuaries. 
The window curtains were of faded cretonne. The worn 
rocking chair had a knitted antimacassar. Two battered rag 
dolls sat on an old spindle-legged dresser against the wall. 
A spirit dwelt there that I did not know. 

But I am wandering away from my subject. What I 
started to say was that Philibert’s life hung by the thread 
of Jane’s belief in him and he knew it. If he thought that 
thread was an iron cable then that fatuous belief alone might 
explain his putting such a strain upon it, but I don’t believe 
it was so. However far he thought he could try Jane, there 
was no sense in doing so, and he wouldn’t have done so 
had he followed the dictates of his own wisdom. It would 
have been so easy to have gone for a week to Joigny. Two 
days would have sufficed. A three hours’ journey in the 
train, two days away from Bianca, and Jane would have 
been reassured and his own future secure. So he would 
have reasoned it out had he been left alone, but Bianca did 
not leave him alone. 

Her motive was quite simply to make mischief. She 
wanted Jane to suffer. She loved Philibert but she wanted 
him to suffer as well. There was nothing more in it than 
that. The most subtle people have sometimes the simplest 
purposes. Bianca’s subtlety often consisted in doing very 
ordinary things in a way that made them appear extraor¬ 
dinary. Her cleverness in this instance lay in the fact that 
Philibert did not suspect her motive. It is even doubtful 
whether he knew that it was she who prevented his going. 
Certainly she never did anything so stupid as to tell him not 
to go. It was rather the other way round. If they discussed 
it at all it was Bianca who urged upon him the advisability 
of his doing his duty as a husband. I can imagine her lying 
back on her divan with her lovely little spindly arms over her 
head and saying with a yawn, that really he was too negli¬ 
gent of his wife. His wife adored him. She was ready to 
fall into his arms. She was probably very sulky now, but 
once he appeared she would welcome him with all the ardour 


132 Jane—Our Stranger 

she was saving up during her villegiature. I can see Bianca 
looking at Philibert through half-closed eyes, while she 
touched up for him a portrait of Jane calculated to make him 
shudder. 

Bianca herself was going yachting in the Mediterranean. 
She wanted to be hot, to soak in enough sunlight to keep 
her warm for next winter. They were to laze about the 

Grecian islands. G-the historian was to be one of the 

party. While she was giving her body a prolonged Turkish 
Bath and taking a course in Greek history, he would be free 
to bring in the cows with Jane. No, he couldn’t come with 
her, it would be too compromising for him. American 
women began divorce proceedings on the least provocation. 

And Philibert, of course, did go on that yacht to the 
Grecian isles, but to judge from his humour when he re¬ 
turned, he did not get out of the trip what he had expected. 
Bianca having lured him out there seemed to forget that he 
had come at her invitation. She left the party at the first op¬ 
portunity and went off inland on a donkey, and didn’t come 
back, merely sent a message for her maid and her boxes 
to meet her at Athens. 

Nor did Philibert find Jane waiting for him in Paris 
as he had expected, nor any message from her. It was the 
butler who informed him that Madame had gone to Biar¬ 
ritz with the Prince and Princess IvanofT, and it was to 
Biarritz that Philibert was obliged to go to fetch her home. 



XI 


T HINGS had been going very badly with the Ivan- 
offs. Their combined resources left them poorer 
than either had been before. Ivanoff’s resources 
consisted in debts, but debts that he never was obliged to 
pay, because he couldn’t. His creditors, those I mean 
who were in the business of money-lending, became more 
hopeful when he married and approached Fan without delay, 
believing of course, that being an American she was rich. 
Poor Fan with her few meagre thousands a year 
meted them out bravely enough at first, paying here and 
there, the minimum that was nevertheless her maximum. 
Ivanoff had a small rather shabby flat on the Isle St. Louis, 
with one big room. It could be said of it that the place 
had atmosphere and would attract their friends if they 
made the most of its Bohemian charm. So they decided 
to live there, thinking thus to keep down their expenses. 
But Fan needed many things that had been unnecessary to 
the existence of Ivanoff. She required cleanliness, a bath¬ 
room with a hot-water installation, cupboards to hold her 
clothes, a lace coverlet for her bed, and enough wood and 
coal to keep the place warm. Ivanoff had never realized 
the damp and cold; when he was cold he drank vodka or 
brandy. He had not been over fond of washing; he took 
his baths at the club or in a public bath house. Fan’s 
maid was a complication. There was no proper room for 
her. She was constantly grumbling about Fan’s discomfort 
and served her little mistress with grim disapproval, mak¬ 
ing continual scenes with the Prince for the way he failed 
to look after the Princess, and going out herself on the 
sly to buy things for the house that she felt were wanted. 

133 


134 Jane—Our Stranger 

The one department in the menage that ran well was the 
kitchen. Ivanoff had a gift for cooking. He could train 
any youngster and turn him in three months into an excellent 
cook. When they gave parties he would go into the kitchen, 
put on an apron, roll up his sleeves and cook the dinner. 
He did his own marketing, going out with a basket on his 
arm. One ate better at his table than anywhere else in 
Paris. He used to make a bit now and then by passing one 
of his cooks on to a friend. He bought his wines in out 
of the way corners of France, and got them cheap, and 
these too, he sometimes sold at a profit. Nevertheless their 
expenses during the first year of their marriage were more 
than double their income. They had many friends; a great 
number of Russians, French, Italians, and Spanish and a few 
Americans came to their suppers, that were served in the big 
living room. People ate reclining or squatting on cushions 
with little tables before them. When the tables were carried 
out, some as yet undiscovered artist from a distant country 
turned up with a violin under his arm, or Ivanoff himself 
with his guitar on his knees would sing the folksongs of 
his country, with the long window open to the moonlit 
river and the dimly-looming towers of Notre Dame. All 
this was very gay and pleasant, but they could not keep it 
up unless they did something to make money. For a year 
Fan tried to find a respectable employment for her husband, 
but she was met everywhere with polite, but to her, mystify¬ 
ing refusals. Even the antique dealers refused to employ 
him to buy for them. Yes, they admitted, he had an ex¬ 
ceptional “flair/’ but he had no idea of money, and if he 
fell in love with a piece was as likely as not, in a burst 
of enthusiasm, to pay the owner more than he asked. And 
Ivanoff himself said that he had no capacity for steady work 
of any kind. She would send him to interview some finan¬ 
cier or banker; he would go and talk charmingly about all 
manner of things save the business in hand, and then say 
“You know the Princess my wife wants you to do some¬ 
thing for me. I have come to please her, but of course 


Jane—Our Stranger 135 

you and I understand that it is no use. It wouldn’t last a 
month, and I might make some mistake that would anger 
you.” And he would come away happily, to report to Fan 
that there was nothing he could do in that line. She was 
obliged to admit him to be incorrigible. The only thing 
he could do to make money was play cards. He played 
Bridge superlatively well. If he played enough he could 
count on making a hundred thousand francs a year. 

I believe, because Jane has insisted that it was so, that 
Fan was for a long time unaware of the fact that Ivanoff 
made a living at cards, and I know that when she discovered 
that his stories about rents from properties in Russia were 
fairy tales and that the sums he turned over to her were 
really his winnings at little green baize tables, that she took 
it very hard for a time, and made him stop playing, but 
how could they then pay their bills? For six months she 
held out and he obediently stayed away from his clubs, 
spent his time wandering along the quays, twanging his 
guitar on his sofa, and cooking the dinner, while Fan’s lit¬ 
tle wizened face grew sharper and her laugh shriller and 
her cough more troublesome. 

The inevitable happened. She caught cold. There was 
no coal to heat the flat. The maid, Margot, flew at Ivanoff, 
in a paroxysm. Ivanoff wept and tore his hair, fell at 
the foot of Fan’s bed, implored her forgiveness and rushed 
off to the Club. One is obliged to accept the inevitable. 
Fan asked no questions after that. I thought that I de¬ 
tected a furtive look in her eyes and a note of high bravado 
in her gaiety, when she staggered out of bed to go about 
again amusing herself. I imagined that she was ashamed. 
I may be wrong. In any case though every one knew their 
circumstances, she remained enormously popular. 

The strange thing was that Ivanoff could always find peo¬ 
ple to play with him. The certain knowledge that they 
stood to lose heavily, irresistibly attracted men to his table, 
rich men, of course, he only played with rich men. He 
couldn’t afford Bridge as a pastime. And I know for cer- 


136 Jane—Our Stranger 

tain that he derived from it no amusement. If his victims 
approached that square of green baize with pleasurable 
shivers of excitement, it was not so with him. Winning 
money at cards was no more interesting to him than is the 
breaking of stones to an Italian'labourer. He played with 
what seemed to most people an exaggerated pretence of 
boredom, but his boredom was no pretence. Ivanoff never 
pretended in his life. He was a child of nature, a great 
dark abyssmal child of the Slavic race. People liked him, 
they couldn’t help it. He was considered rather mad and 
utterly undependable. He had a way of disappearing mys¬ 
teriously, and of reappearing again suddenly, and he never 
attempted to account for these absences. “Where have you 
been this time Ivanoff,” some one at the club would ask him, 
and he would smile’his wide mongolian smile that narrowed 
his eyes to slits making him look like a chinaman, and 
then a worried wistful look would come over his sallow face 
and he would smooth carefully his heavy black hair—“I 
don’t know,” he would say, “I really can’t remember,” and 
somehow one believed him. He drank heavily, and when 
he was drunk he would talk about God, and the soul of the 
Russian people that was a deep pure soul besotted with 
despair, and would say that God in His wisdom must put 
an end to human misery very soon. He had an extraor¬ 
dinary gift for languages. Indeed he had many gifts and 
no capacity and no ambition. It never seemed to occur to 
him that he ought to provide for his wife, or look after 
her. For the most part, between his disappearances he fol¬ 
lowed her about like a great tame bear. He had an immense 
respect for her. “What a head she has,” he would say. 
“What a head for figures, and what a will. She can make 
me do anything, anything, except the things for which 
I am incurably incapacitated. I am like wax in her 
hands.” 

Poor Fan! If he had had a little more respect for him¬ 
self and a little less for her, it would have been easier for 
her. He drank more and more heavily as time went on. 


Jane—Our Stranger 137 

Night after night he would come home to her drunk and lie in 
a stupor wherever he happened to fall. Again and again 
he would beg her forgiveness, throw himself at her feet, 
kissing them and weeping like a heart-broken child. And 
because she found him beautiful, and because she believed 
he loved her, she did, over and over again forgive him, but 
she was worried half out of her mind. It began to dawn on 
her that his card-playing wasn’t enough; that he borrowed 
money of everybody. She foresaw that the day would soon 
dawn when every one of his men friends was a creditor. It 
didn’t occur to her at this time that he borrowed money from 
women as well. Nor did it occur to her as a possible solu¬ 
tion to cut down her expenses by changing her mode of life. 
She and Ivanoff, and a lot of their friends for that matter, 
lived on the principle that, as Montesquieu said, it was 
bad enough not to have money, but, if in addition one had 
to deprive oneself of the things one wanted, then life would 
be intolerable. She had married Ivanoff to be a princess 
and to have a good time. She was still pleased with being 
a princess and more determined than ever to enjoy herself. 
Pleasure, noisy, distracting absorbing pleasure was becom¬ 
ing more and more necessary to her. As her troubles 
thickened, her craving for excitement grew. The more she 
was worried the more she needed to laugh. Her life became 
a staccato tune of laughter and hurting throbs and petulant 
crescendoes of gaiety. It was a tinkling dance with a drum¬ 
ming accompaniment of worry, the rhythm of it moving 
faster and faster as her problem deepened. 

And people as I say liked her. Even Claire continued to 
see much of her. She was considered original and very 
plucky. Her parties were amusing, and she herself could 
be trusted to make any dinner a success. Her very shrill 
yell of laughter came to have a definite social value. She 
talked with a hard gay abandon that affected people like a 
spray of hot salt water. Fagged and blase spirits turned 
to her for refreshment. She would enter a drawing-room 
on the run, and call out some extravagant yet neat phrase, 


138 Jane—Our Stranger 

and every one would become perky and animated. Always 
she had had some amusing and extraordinary adventure five 
minutes before her arrival. Her taxi had dumped her into 
the street, or a man had tried to abduct her or she had found 
a bill of a thousand francs lying on the doorstep. One 
never questioned her veracity. Nobody cared whether these 
things really happened or whether she made them up for 
the general amusement. It was all the more to her credit if 
she took the trouble to invent them. And enough things 
did happen to her, heaven knows, dreadful things. She was 
always in trouble. Her health was execrable. People men¬ 
tioned phthisis. She had a way of fainting in the street 
and waking up in strange houses from which she had 
miraculous escapes. Decorated by her amusing gift of 
description, made entertaining by her contagious laughter, 
her miseries and her unfortunate adventures came to be 
an endless source of amusement in society. Her misfor¬ 
tune was her social capital; she turned it all to account. 

Jane alone was not amused. Jane alone took Fan’s 
troubles seriously as if they had been her own, and watched 
her with concern and tried to reason with her. But Fan 
didn’t want any one to reason with her and was annoyed 
by Jane’s anxiety. At bottom I believe, during this period 
of their existence, that Jane bored her. She loved her, of 
course, in a way, because of their childhood, she knew that 
she could count on her in any crisis, but she preferred talk¬ 
ing to Philibert. When she lunched in Jane’s house, she 
and Philibert would sit together after lunch and scream 
with laughter, and then, when she was about to leave, her 
little face would suddenly turn grey with fatigue, and she 
would say to Jane’s anxious enquiry—‘‘Yes, my dear, I’m as 
sick as a dog. I haven’t slept for a month. I’m living 
on piqures ” and then, tearing herself out of Jane’s embrace 
she would go away coughing, coughing terribly all the way 
down the stairs. Jane gave her a good many clothes. Fan 
told me so herself. “My dear,” she said, “I’m not going 
with Jane any more to her dressmaker’s. She insists on my 


Jane—Our Stranger 139 

taking too many things, and if I don’t she’s hurt. I escaped 
from Cheruit’s this morning with nothing more than a chin¬ 
chilla coat. What do you think of that? I shall send it 
back when it comes, and there’ll be a scene.” And she did 
send it back, and there was I suppose, what she would call 
a scene. Jane spoke of it too, for she had overheard. She 
said—'‘Of course I’d rather give Fan blankets and coals, 
but as I can’t do anything sensible for her, why shouldn’t 
she let me do something foolish?” 

I will say for Fan that she did not sponge, neither on 
Jane nor on any one else. She left that part of it to Ivan- 
off. And again Jane insisted that she didn’t know about 
Ivanoff. In any case it was Ivanoff who gave Jane her 
opportunity, as she believed, to help Fan. He came to see 
her one afternoon in a high state of excitement, made her 
swear she would never tell Fan a word of what had passed 
between them, and then asked her for fifty thousand francs. 
He said that they would be turned out into the street if he 
couldn’t get the money in two days, and that every stick 
of their furniture would be sold. It was unnecessary for 
him to explain to Jane why Fan should not be told. Jane 
knew, at least she thought she knew, that Fan would refuse 
the money. So she gave Ivanoff a cheque payable to her¬ 
self and endorsed it and felt happy to have been able to 
help them. Ivanoff had pointed out that it would be best 
for her not to make out a cheque in his name. This was 
the thin end of the wedge. 

Ivanoff having been well received, came back six months 
later and again after that. He had from Jane all told 
about two hundred thousand francs during a period of two 
or three years, not a large sum to Jane certainly. She easily 
enough hid the payments from Philibert by paying the 
amounts out of her personal account for clothes, travelling, 
flowers, trinkets, and so on. Occasionally she would 
countermand an order for a fur coat and feel that she was 
making a personal sacrifice for Fan, and this added a very 
real element of joy to her pleasure. And there was no 


140 Jane—Our Stranger 

doubt in her mind that this money did go to help Fan. 
Ivanoff always had some tale of Fan’s illnesses, her doc¬ 
tors’ bills, her need to go to some watering place for a cure, 
her last unfortunate venture in the stock market. Never¬ 
theless Jane was worried. She was worried, God help her, 
because she was deceiving Philibert. The subject was heavy 
on her mind. At times she felt she must tell Philibert all 
about it, but Philibert did not like Ivanoff. She was afraid 
to tell him for fear he should put a stop to her doing any¬ 
thing more in that quarter. Philibert tolerated Fan because 
she was amusing and helped to occupy Jane, but he would 
not tolerate Ivanoff, and refused to have the Russian in his 
house. He was unaware of the latter’s quarterly after¬ 
noon visits. This, too, Jane had been obliged to keep from 
him. If she told Philibert that Ivanoff had been to call 
and had been received, she would have to explain why. 
Philibert seldom showed any interest in the people she re¬ 
ceived on her day in the afternoon, but he did occasionally 
ask her who had been there, and suggest that one or an¬ 
other was really too stupid or too ugly to be welcomed 
under his roof. He did not wish his house to be invaded 
by touring Americans or by the halt, the lame and the blind, 
so he exercised a sort of censorship over his wife’s calling 
list. Ivanoff was one of the people who to Philibert were 
beyond the pale. Up to the night of Bianca’s supper party 
he had forced himself to greet the big Russian with civility 
when he met him in other people’s houses, but after the 
beastly exhibition the latter had made of himself there, he 
had let it be known that he did not wish to find himself again 
anywhere in the same room with him. 

It was therefore extremely unpleasant to Philibert to 
learn from his butler that Jane had gone to Biarritz with 
the Ivanoffs. Nothing, indeed, that Jane could have done 
could have been so disagreeable to him. Had she planned 
it on purpose as a revenge, she could not have calculated 
better, and he believed she had done so. He had come to 
his senses. He had perceived during the train journey 


Jane—Our Stranger 141 

north that he had been very foolish to take such risks. 
It occurred to him that he had not heard from Jane for two 
months, and that he did not know where she was. She 
might have gone to America, she might be there with the 
intention of not coming back. She was capable of any¬ 
thing. The news he received on arrival was a relief that 
left him free to enjoy his exasperation. He was not in a 
desperate fix after all, it was Jane who was in a fix. She 
had at last given him a definite cause of complaint and 
had incurred his displeasure in a way that made it easy 
for him to act against her. If this were her way of tak¬ 
ing a line of her own and paying him back, she had played 
beautifully into his hands. He took the train for Biarritz, 
smiling and revolving pleasantly in his heart the things 
he would say. 

But Jane had had no ulterior motive in what she had 
done. She had come back to Paris at the end of Septem¬ 
ber and had found Fan lying exhausted by haemorrhage in 
an untidy bed with a bowl of blood beside her, and Ivanoff 
on the floor, his head in his hands, sobbing, while Margot 
stormed at him for his uselessness. Jane had simply picked 
Fan up in her arms, and had carried her away, and Ivanoff 
like an unhappy dog had followed, his tail between his 
legs. The haemorrhage had thoroughly frightened him. It 
was a fortnight later that Philibert, one brilliant afternoon 
announced himself at the Palace Hotel Biarritz. Fan was 
better and Ivanoff had recovered from his terror. Phili¬ 
bert found the two women in an upstairs sitting-room over¬ 
looking the sea. Fan was on a couch, her little wizened 
face screwed into a smile of bravado under her lace bonnet, 
and a cigarette between her rouged lips. Jane looked the 
more ill of the two. Her usual glowing pallor had turned 
to the whitish-grey of ashes, there were purple circles under 
her eyes. She was looking out of the window, her hands 
clasped behind her head, and when Philibert entered she 
wheeled at the sound of his voice, and then stood silently 
trembling. 


142 Jane—Our Stranger 

Fan cried out at him, gaily impertinent. “Hullo, Fifi, 
you didn’t come too soon, did you ?” 

He didn’t answer her. “Come with me,” he said to Jane 
briefly, and she followed him out of the room. He had 
passed Ivanoff below in the bar. The sight had added noth¬ 
ing pleasant to his humour. 

What he said to her was what he had intended to say. 
Her wasted face made no impression in her favour, on 
the contrary. He read in her agitation signs of guilt and 
seemed to have forgotten that he had abandoned her 
during six months on the pretext that she loved him too 
much. 

As for Jane, she listened to him in a silence that she 
tried to make natural and easy. 

Telling me about it afterwards she said, “I had deter¬ 
mined this time to give him no opportunity of laughing at 
me. I made scarcely a movement. Though I was trem¬ 
bling, I managed to sit down in a comfortable chair and 
cross my legs and lean back, as if he had come to tell me 
something pleasant.” 

He expressed without preamble his displeasure at finding 
her in the company of the Ivanoffs. He was surprised to 
find that she cared for such people. She knew, that he 
loathed Ivanoff and considered him an unfit companion for 
any respectable woman. He saw no reason why his wife 
should make his name a by-word in the glaring publicity 
of such a place as Biarritz. Here she was in the centre of 
a dissolute set of cosmopolitan adventurers, behaving like a 
common woman of light character, or at least giving the im¬ 
pression to the world of so behaving. He presumed that 
the Ivanoffs were her guests and were costing her a pretty 
penny. That was a side issue. The Russian was a dis¬ 
solute ruffian who lived not alone on his winning at cards 
but on women. He was a man kept by women. As for 
Ivanoff’s wife, she knew what her husband was up to and 
profitted by his earnings. Jane, with white lips inter¬ 
rupted him here. 


Jane—Our Stranger 143 

“I don’t believe you,” she said quietly. And then more 
sharply, “You forget that Fan is my best friend.” 

He sneered. “I do not forget. I am merely unable to 
congratulate you on your taste. As for Ivanoff’s habits 
I can give you precise details. There is a woman in this 
hotel—” Something in Jane’s face stopped him. She did 
not speak at once, but leaning slightly forward, one arm 
on the table before her, looked at him calmly and smiled. 
She had done a good deal of thinking during those lonely 
months at Joigny. Alone and unobserved she had passed 
through her crisis. She was no longer the same person. 
Day after day, tramping the country, she had passed in re¬ 
view the years of her marriage and had scrutinized their 
every content, discovering slowly their meaning. She had 
learned a great many things. She was beginning to under¬ 
stand more than she had ever dreamed existed, of complica¬ 
tion and danger in her surroundings, and she had deter¬ 
mined if Philibert came back to her to put up a fight for 
her life, she meant her life with him: for the one thing 
she had not yet learned was to despise him. She still blamed 
herself for not having made him love her. She still cared 
for him. But she had learned a great deal, and among 
other things she had found out that she was alone. There 
was no one for her to turn to. His family, with one pos¬ 
sible exception, myself, she realized now disliked her. 

So she met him calmly. His attack had actually been a 
relief to her. Her agitation had been due just simply to 
the marvellous fact of his having come back to her, and 
she read in his annoyance a proof of his not being after all 
as indifferent to herself as he tried to make her believe. 
She voiced this. 

“I was not aware,” she said quietly, “that you in the 
least cared what I did.” Her words and her tone startled 
him. He looked at her quickly. It was clear to him that 
she was older and wiser and would be more difficult to deal 
with than he had supposed. A gleam shot out at her from 
his eyes. It met an answering gleam. In silence their 


144 J ANE —Our Stranger 

wills clashed. They were both aware that a struggle had 
begun. It was she who, after a moment, continued— 

“I do not believe what you say about Fan and Ivanoff. 
I know that your worst accusation is untrue. Fan is in¬ 
capable of accepting such money.” She paused as if to 
calculate her effect and added deliberately. “As for Ivan¬ 
off, if he lives on women then I am one of them. I have 
lent him money myself.” 

He had turned away from her, but at this he whirled 
round like a top, his face contorted. 

“What? What do you say? You? You have given 
him—?” 

“Yes, I have given him money on several occasions.” 

Her immobility had its effect. He hung over her speech¬ 
less, his lips twitching, and she continued to look at him. 
At last she spoke. 

“What do you think I gave him money for, Philibert?” 

He saw instantly his danger. Her tone conveyed it to 
him. If he voiced a suspicion of anything so horrible he 
destroyed himself for ever in her eyes. His brain worked 
quickly enough to save him. Marvellously and lucidly he 
knew she would never forgive him for suspecting her, and 
suddenly he knew that she could not be accused. Her vir¬ 
tue that had so bored him was unassailable and her pride 
frightened him. Whether he liked it or not there it was 
before him, and as if he couldn’t bear the sight of it he 
whirled away from her and stalked to the window, mutter¬ 
ing peevishly something about his not knowing why or 
what she had been up to. But she didn’t let him off. Her 
voice followed him across the room. 

“I gave Ivanoff money for Fan. You understand that, 
don’t you, Philibert. You don’t suggest for a moment any¬ 
thing else, do you ?” 

He remained with his back to her, and she remained 
where she was, waiting, watching his nervous hands that 
twisted his coat-tails, and his foot kicking the window-sill, 


Jane—Our Stranger 145 

watching her image of him shrinking, wavering, changing. 
At last she rose. She was afraid now, afraid of despising 
him, afraid to watch him any longer. She moved to the 
door and from her further distance spoke again. 

“I have given Ivanoff in all two hundred and fifty thou¬ 
sand francs. If you have anything to say about my doing 
so, please speak now. I am waiting/’ 

And he, at last, found the words with which to meet her. 

“I don’t believe Fan ever got a penny of it.” 

At that she faltered a moment, but only a moment. 
Her tone when she spoke was smooth and light. 

“Well, if she didn’t it’s lost.” She could take it as high 
as that. She gave a little shrug, just the slightest shrug. 
It may be that she really did strike him as almost coming 
up to his own standard at that moment. In any case he 
chose the instant for his own recovery. He had seemed 
not to know what to do. He had made a very painful 
impression. His indecision had humiliated her more than 
his violence. She felt ashamed for him now, and all the 
pent-up passion in her surged uncomfortably, hurtingly, 
against the shock her opinion of him had received, sending 
hot waves of blood pounding through her veins, that gave 
her a feeling of sickness. He divined something of this. 
It was time that he recovered himself, and his recovery was 
beautiful. It shows him, I maintain, an artist. He went 
up to her deliberately and took her hand, and looking into 
her eyes said—“You are astounding,” then watching his ef¬ 
fect he added, “You are superb. I do not understand, but 
I admire.” And then deliberately with consummate gal- 
antry he kissed her hand. 

And poor Jane was pleased. On top of all her deep 
misery she was conscious of a little silvery ripple of 
pleasure. Though it would never be the same with her 
again she thought that she had won a battle, and made an 
impression, and with a kind of anguish of renunciation she 
accepted his offering. . She knew now that he would never 


146 Jane—Our Stranger 

give her what she wanted, but she believed that he was pre¬ 
pared at last to give her something, and she was bound to 
allow him to do so. 

They left Biarritz the next day, having agreed between 
them on a number of things. Jane was to inform the Ivan- 
offs that their rooms were retained for a fortnight longer. 
Philibert promised that he would never allow Ivanoff to 
know that he knew Jane had given him money. Jane in 
return agreed not to repeat the experiment and to have 
no further dealings with Ivanoff of any kind. She refused, 
however, to give up seeing Fan as she had always done. 


XII 


O NE day toward the middle of the winter of that year, 
Claire said to me; “What has happened to Phil¬ 
ibert? He acts as if he were in love with his 
wife.” It was true. We had all noticed it. I mean Claire 
and my mother and myself, but gradually we came to notice 
something else as well, namely that Philibert’s increased at¬ 
tentions did not seem to be making Jane happy. She was 
strangely preoccupied and for her, strangely languid. Her 
old buoyancy was gone, and with it the impression she had 
so often conveyed of an over-powering awkward energy. 
Maman need never fear now that Jane would fall on her 
and crush her. Claire need not worry about being pushed 
into corners. When Jane did join our family parties, and 
she came much less frequently than in the early days, she 
was almost always so absent-minded as to seem scarcely 
to realize where she was. She would come in with Phil¬ 
ibert and the child Genevieve, kiss my mother gently on 
the forehead and then sink into a chair and forget us. We 
might now have said anything preposterous that came into 
our heads. She would not have noticed us. She did not 
listen to our talk, and when we addressed her directly 
would give a little start and say— “Je vous demande pardon, 
je n’ai pas compris.” Sometimes I caught Philibert watch¬ 
ing her as if he too were mystified and troubled. He would 
drag her into the conversation. “Mais, mon amie, ecoutes 
done, quemd on vous parle,” he would exclaim in affection¬ 
ate remonstrance, and she would flush a little and make a 
very obvious effort to pay attention. My mother felt there 
was something wrong. It may have seemed to her that 
she was herself responsible. She may hr-ve felt a certain 

i47 


148 Jane—Our Stranger 

contrition about Jane, or she may merely have found it 
intolerable that any one should derive from her drawing 
room circle so little apparent interest. In any case she 
made on her part an effort and talked to Jane much more, 
and in a different more intimate way than she had ever 
done before. And, of course, when actually talking directly 
to Maman Jane was perfectly attentive and perfectly 
courteously sweet-tempered. But when my mother turned 
her head toward some one else, Jane, as if released from 
the end of some invisible string that had held her erect in 
her chair, would slip back and lean her cheek on her hand, 
and the light in her eyes would be veiled by that invisible 
glaze that means an inward gazing. Such are the eyes of 
the blind. One could at such moment have waved one’s 
fingers an inch from Jane’s face, and she would not have 
blinked, at least that was my impression. 

And she was incredibly thin. Many people thought this 
becoming to her, but to me it was painful. I had no wish 
to find Jane beautiful if I felt that she was going to die, 
and there were days when I did feel she was, as one says, 
going into a decline. She had been so harmoniously big 
that one would never have supposed she carried much su¬ 
perfluous flesh, until one saw it wasting away and found 
her still alive, and not a hideous skeleton. Her marvellous 
hands and feet were now, I suppose, even more marvellous, 
but to me their beautiful exposed structure of lovely bones 
was a source of pain. Her wrists and ankles were so slim 
that one felt if she made a wrong movement they would 
snap, and her rich lustrous clothes seemed to find round 
her waist and bust nothing to cling to. Only her broad 
shoulders and narrow hips seemed to support them. One 
could not tell where her waist was. Sometimes under the 
silken fabric of her skirt one saw the shape of a sharp knee 
bone. Her face seemed to have grown much smaller. The 
cheeks hollowed in under prominent cheek-bones, and her 
small green eyes were sunk into her head—that was 
more than ever like some carved antique coin and had 


Jane—Our Stranger 149 

taken on a quite terrifying beauty; I mean that the charm 
of her ugliness had received its special ordained stamp, the 
mark that the god or imp who made it had meant it to have. 
She reddened her lips a little now; otherwise her face was 
untouched by powder or rouge. The skin was of the palest 
ivory colour, a close smooth dull surface, without a blemish, 
soft and pure and dead. There was about the texture of 
her skin something curious. It made one dream of a con¬ 
tact so cold that if a butterfly brushed against it the little 
living thing would fall lifeless to the ground. 

And a new charm disengaged itself from her person. 
She seemed possessed of a hitherto-unused and undis¬ 
covered magnetism, and she dwelt with it silently, wrapped 
in a kind of gentle gloom that she tried now and then to throw 
off as one throws off a wet clinging garment. I do not 
want to give the impression that she was moody, for that 
would be untrue. She was, on the contrary, of an uncanny 
equanimity, and when she smiled her smile crept slowly 
and softly over her face and as softly faded away. There 
was no jerk of nerves about it. Nervous was the last word 
one could apply to her. She was superlatively quiet, un¬ 
naturally calm, and yet at times she looked at me like a 
haunted woman, a woman haunted not by a ghost but by 
an idea, perhaps by some profoundly disturbing knowledge. 

We were increasingly troubled. We wondered if at last 
she had found out things about Philibert, particularly about 
Philibert and Bianca, and somehow the fact that we knew 
he was devoting himself more to Jane and less to Bianca 
did not console us. What indeed was it but just the most 
disturbing thing of all that Philibert’s new devotion to 
Jane produced in her no flush of responsive joy? My 
mother was very worried indeed, and we were affected by 
her anxiety. Even Claire began to watch Jane with a 
questioning puzzled attention. Often I found Claire’s dark 
eyes travelling from Jane to Philibert, from Philibert to my 
mother, from my mother back to Jane. And simultane¬ 
ously my mother’s eyes moved from one to the other, and 


150 Jane—Our Stranger 

so did Philibert’s and so did mine. We were all looking 
from one to the other, watching, referring, puzzling, compar¬ 
ing. Jane alone looked at no one. 

I should have felt this to be humorous had it not humili¬ 
ated and annoyed. It seemed to me that we were slightly 
ridiculous at times, and at other times lacking in delicacy. 
The last impression irked me exceedingly. For my mother 
and sister to be guilty of indelicacy was strangely unpleas¬ 
ant, I knew they were not impelled in their new interest by 
affection. They did not even now care for Jane. She had 
become to them an enigma; that of course was something 
more than she had been; there was a shade of admiration 
now in their wondering, but no genuine feeling for her and 
no sympathy. Their sympathy was for Philibert, and per¬ 
haps, a little for themselves. In any case they were afraid 
for Philibert. They saw his great social edifice swaying. 
They were holding their breath. And Jane gave them no 
sign. Had she calculated her effect with consummate art her 
manner could not have been more perfectly tuned to the 
high fine note of suspense. And they dared not to ask her 
anything. 

But as the weeks passed, they gave way to asking each 
other. In her absence they constantly talked of her. It 
was curious how much of their attention she took up by 
staying so much away. Claire and my mother could now 
often be heard to say—“Have you seen Jane? What is 
the child doing with herself? I find her looking very 
unwell. Has she complained to you of feeling ill?” and 
now and again with a sigh of reproach either my mother or 
Claire would say to the other—“What a pity you never 
won her confidence. She tells us nothing, but absolutely 
nothing. It’s as if she didn’t trust us.” 

And Philibert seemed as much at a loss as they. He 
could enlighten them very little. Gradually as their ner¬ 
vousness made them less discreet they took to questioning 
him. “But what is the matter with her?” they would ask, 
and he would shrug his shoulders. He didn’t know. Did he 


Jane—Our Stranger 151 

think she was ill? No, she wasn’t ill, she had never been 
so active. Was she then unhappy? Ah, who could say? 
She was now and then very gay, much gayer at moments 
than he had ever known her. She went out constantly. 
She had ideas of her own about receiving. She was arrang¬ 
ing a series of musical evenings for the audition of un¬ 
published works of young French composers. She was 
multiplying her activities. Sometimes he did not see her 
alone for days together. And here my mother gently and 
timidly interrupted him. “Mais mon enfant, when she is 
alone with you, is she amiable, is she kind? Enfin, is she 
gracious?” And Philibert again, but this time with a more 
exaggerated movement, shrugged his shoulders —“Comme 
cela. I have no right to complain.” 

And then quickly I saw them all look at each other and 
saw the same thought flit from one mind to the other and 
dodge away out of sight, and the spectacle of those intelli¬ 
gent evasive glances exasperated me. 

“Yes, it’s a different story now, isn’t it?” I didn’t care 
for their combined shocked stare, now centred on myself, 
and continued to Philibert—“After all, you’ve got what you 
wanted, haven’t you? You remember you told her not to 
love you so much.” 

“Blaize!” My mother’s exclamation was a check. I had 
a sensation of shaking myself free. “Well, isn’t it so? 
Weren’t you all awfully bored with her caring too much 
for you, and now that she doesn’t, now that she has with¬ 
drawn, is leading a life of her own, you are troubled, you 
wonder. How can you wonder ? Isn’t it all quite simple ?” 
But I knew that it was not so simple after all, so I stopped. 

“You think then,” put in my sister gravely, “that she 
no longer cares for us?” Her tone made me stare in my 
turn. It was earnest and enquiring, and I heard Philibert 
to my astonishment echoing her words. “Ah, you believe 
she no longer cares?” And most wonderful of all my 
mother’s phrase. “Tell us, Blaize, what she does feel. 
I believe that you understand her better than we do.” 


152 Jane—Our Stranger 

It was quite extraordinary. I had the strangest feeling 
for a moment of pride and power. They had all turned 
to me. They had all recognized simultaneously that I pos¬ 
sessed something valuable. And for a moment I enjoyed 
the novel sensation. They wanted something from me, that 
was pleasant, but what they wanted was Jane’s secret. They 
believed she had confided in me, and they believed I would 
tell them. I felt again weary and impatient and humiliated, 
and I brought out the truth abruptly. “I know no more 
than you do what is going on in Jane’s mind, she has told 
me nothing.” But I saw that they did not believe me. 

The room, my mother’s room, seemed to shrink visibly. 
It appeared very small and trivial. Its innumerable bibe¬ 
lots and souvenirs winked and glinted, mischievous and 
precious, minute tokens of delicate prejudice, obstinate and 
conventional and colourless. It all looked small and mean¬ 
ingless and pale. I could have laughed. I was important 
there at last. But it was a tiny place to me now. I pitied 
it. I felt suddenly free and alone. I thought—“Jane has 
told me nothing, it is true, nevertheless she trusts me,” and 
I felt them reading my mind and it didn’t matter. They 
might know for all I cared that I knew nothing, they would 
feel all the same that I knew Jane as they would never know 
her. But what they would never know was, that knowing 
Jane as I did, I knew many other things, wonderful things. 
I felt a lift, a lightening, a widening of space, a fresh rush 
of wind as if I was being blown upon by the breath of those 
wide American forests. Somewhere in my mind vistas 
opened. I heard the murmuring of a free wind in high 
branches. And all the time I saw my frail little mother in 
her damask chair, in her little crowded silken room, and I 
loved her with tenderness and compassion. An impulse 
seized me. I went over to her. I took her hand. 

“If only you would love her,” I said, “everything would 
be all right.” Then I saw that I had blundered. How 
cotdd I have been so stupid as to have imagined that they 
had been with me for that moment in those wide high 


Jane—Our Stranger 153 

spaces where I knew Jane lived? My words sounded gro¬ 
tesque and fatuous. I saw a shade come over my mother’s 
face. I heard Claire’s swish of impatient drapery. Phili¬ 
bert snorted. I felt myself blushing. My face tingled. 
I had made myself ridiculous. My mother’s hand kept me 
off. Its nervous clasp pushed me from her while she mur¬ 
mured plaintively —“Mais je I’aime bien, mais je Vaime 
bien.” 

Claire followed me out of the room. In the little dark 
hall we stood close together. She had closed the door of 
the drawing room after her. Beyond it we heard Phili¬ 
bert’s high nasal voice arguing. “What do you really think, 
Blaise?” My sister’s voice was low and confidential. I 
felt her mind pressing upon me with gentle insistence. 

“I don’t know.” 

“But you see a great deal of her, she talks to you.” 

“Yes, but not about herself.” 

“Come, Blaise.” 

“Not about the present, only of the past, her home over 
there.” 

She made an impatient gesture. 

“Does she never mention Philibert?” 

“Never in any way that matters. How can you think—? 
Do you imagine then that she is vulgar?” 

But Claire’s eyes, tranquil and dark with their usual 
mournful depths of mystery, looked at me deeply as if she 
had not heard. 

“I am afraid,” she said, “of Bianca.” 

I was startled. The idea that Claire was afraid, so 
afraid as to voice her fear to me in that low tone of secret 
confidence, seemed to make everything worse, much more 
miserable. 

“Why?” I asked, searching her face that so often evaded 
me with its mockery and now was so grave and deliberate. 

“She may do something.” 

“What?” 

“I don’t know, but she’s jealous.” 


i54 Jane—Our Stranger 

“Jealous of Jane?” 

“Yes, hadn’t you noticed? She follows her about?” 

“Bianca follows Jane about?” 

“Just that.” 

I thought how strange women are, seeing things that we 
none of us notice. I followed Bianca, Jane and Claire in 
imagination, moving about Paris in smooth rapid motors, 
slipping in and out of crowded streets, shops, drawing¬ 
rooms, theatres, watching each other. But how could Claire 
see one pursuing the other with all those people round them, 
all the music, the waiters, the footmen, the lights scattered 
along dinner-tables, the obstructing tables and chairs, the 
endless engagements? My mind wavered, I felt dizzy. I 
saw each one of the three women stepping out of her car, 
going into her house, the door closing upon her, hiding her 
from the world. 

I came back to Claire’s delicate face and brooding eyes. 

“But why should Bianca be jealous?” 

“But why not?” 

“You mean she thinks Philibert is escaping her?” 

“And isn’t he?” 

“I don’t know.” Suddenly I felt at the end of my 
strength, as if I had been undergoing a great nervous strain. 
“How should I know anything about Philibert? You all 
seem to think I know what Philibert is up to.” I felt 
strangely exasperated. “And what, mon dieu, is there 
exactly between Bianca and Philibert?” 

“Ah,” my sister smiled faintly, “that I cannot tell you, 
but whatever it is, it is enough.” 

“Enough to make trouble, you mean?” 

“Yes, enough to make trouble.” 

“Well, if you really want my opinion, it is that Jane does 
not bother at all about Bianca.” And I began irritably to 
get into my coat. But Claire, helping me on with it, still 
pressed me and said over my shoulder— 

“So you don’t think Jane in her turn is jealous?” 


Jane—Our Stranger 155 

“I don’t think anything about it. What I think is that 
it is none of my business.” And I grabbed my hat and 
left her, but looking back as I went down the few steps 
to the outer door, I saw her looking after me with an in¬ 
scrutable smile, as if she had learned something from me 
that she had wanted to know, and I determined to keep away 
from such family talks in future. 

I had my theory about Jane during those days, of course, 
but according to Clementine I was wrong. Clementine 
thinks that Jane loves Philibert even now, even now over 
there in that dreary little house. I can’t believe it. But 
what does Clementine mean by love, anyway? Clementine 
is a Latin, the smooth willing exponent and devotee of her 
senses. She has known love — a elle a rendontre Vamour plu- 
sieurs fois” If she means anything, if there’s anything 
in what she says about Jane, it is that Philibert still has 
the power to affect Jane, to make her pulse beat quicker, 
even now. I wonder, but I don’t want to think about it. 

I believed that winter that Jane had ceased to care for 
Philibert, and that that was the explanation of her strange¬ 
ness, that made her appear so often like a sleep-walker. I 
argued that to a person like Jane it would be more terrible 
to no longer love than to be no longer loved. There were 
moments when alone in my room with her image before me, 
I was certain that she was beginning to despise him. How 
could she help it I would ask myself, and be filled with 
an exulting bitterness. I see now what it was. I wanted 
her to despise him, and so believed it. But it was not so 
much that I fiendishly wanted Philibert to suffer, for I 
did not believe he would suffer. I wanted Jane to right 
herself. That was it. I wanted her to get loose from 
her bonds that seemed to me to expose her in an attitude 
humiliating and pitiful. I couldn’t bear to contemplate her 
as Philibert’s slave. It was this thought that sent me out 
at night to walk the streets in a fever. Ridiculous?. Per¬ 
haps. But haven’t I a phrase of Jane’s sounding in my 


156 Jane—Our Stranger 

brain even now that justifies all my sickening suspicions of 
the past, one phrase, the only one that she ever let fall that 
threw any light on her relations with her husband. 

It was only the other day in St. Mary’s Plains. Time 
had made it possible for her to speak as she did. Ten 
years, fifteen, had passed, but she spoke with an icy distinct¬ 
ness as if controlling a shudder. 

“Bianca,” she said, “was jealous of that process of cor¬ 
ruption that she called my happiness.” But this is all too 
painful. I must stick to the facts of my story. 

Claire’s fear was all too well founded. Bianca was 
jealous and Bianca was going to intervene. Philibert was 
slipping away from her and falling in love with his stupid 
wife. That could not be tolerated. She stirred uneasily. 
Moreover Paris was beginning to take account of Jane. 
People were talking about her wherever one went. They 
argued about whether she was ugly or just the most beauti¬ 
ful woman in Europe. Sides were equally divided. But 
what did it matter whether one called it beauty or ugliness, 
once her appearance had made its impression upon the 
receptive mind of Paris? The Byzantine Madonna or the 
Egyptian mummy or whatever it was that she had been said 
to resemble had come to life. Paris recognized her as 
singular, and that was all that was necessary. Soon she 
would be the rage. Some one would set the ball rolling. 
Bianca saw it all quite clearly. Like a little witch bending 
^>ver a boiling pot she made her preparations. It would 
be funny to think of if it had not come off just as she in¬ 
tended. The sorceress was again on the move astride her 
broomstick. She was chanting her incantations that were 
meant to bring a woman to the dust and a man to her side. 
But first she sent for Fan and told her all about Ivanoff 
and Jane and about Philibert’s interference in Biarritz. 
She had got the whole story from Philibert and used it 
now with just the effect she wished. She began lamenting 
the fact that she saw so little of Jane, Jane was dropping 
her old friends. Hadn’t Fan noticed a difference? No, 


Jane—Our Stranger 157 

Fan hadn’t. But Ivanoff—surely Jane didn’t see any¬ 
thing much of Ivanoff these days, not at any rate as she 
used to? Fan laughed. If Bianca thought Jane capable 
of flirting—. But Bianca meant nothing so silly. Bianca 
meant simply that Jane had been very foolish and that 
Philibert was angry with Ivanoff and wouldn’t have any¬ 
thing to do with him because of Jane’s foolishness. Fan 
at this, had grown suddenly serious. The rest was easy. 

It all came out. Ivanoff had had large sums of money from 
Jane. Philibert had found out, and Jane had made him 
swear to do nothing about it so that Fan should never know. 
This, of course had been most unfair to Ivanoff as the latter 
had been given no chance to clear himself with Philibert. 
Ivanoff might have been able to explain many things that 
remained obscure. 

The result of this conversation was all that Bianca would 
wish for. Poor Fan rushed home to her dilapidated attic 
on the Isle St. Louis and flung it all at Ivanoff’s great sleek 
meek head. He had been taking money from Jane. How 
much money? When? Why? Where was it? How 
could he? How had he come to think of such a thing? 
Didn’t he have any sense of honour? Didn’t he have any 
shame? Ivanoff bowed his head. Meekly and humbly he 
let her rave at him until exhausted, she flung herself on the 
bed in a torrent of tears, and all that night he sat on the 
floor beside her bed, extravagantly ashamed, thinking vague 
dark hopeless thoughts, and now and then heaving a sigh^ 

It didn’t occur to him, the next day or the next or any 
day after that to explain anything. Probably he was un¬ 
aware that Fan’s second thoughts were more poisoning and 
disturbing to her than the first. Ivanoff was no psycholo¬ 
gist. If he noticed that Fan was strained and looked at 
him queerly, he remained passive and mute, and no light 
of curiosity seemed to strike down into his abysmal calm. 
When suddenly Fan flashed out the question—“Did you 
make love to her?” he merely shook his head, and when at 
last after a week of fidgetting she announced that she had 


158 Jane—Our Stranger 

written to Jane to tell her that they couldn’t pay the money 
back and that she would understand the wisdom of their 
not seeing each other any more, he stared vacantly, then 
frowned and sat down in a heap on the divan for the rest 
of the day. Judging by his fantastic subsequent behaviour, 
he must have been pondering upon the question. He prob¬ 
ably thought—“Women are worthless cattle. Jane has told. 
She has given away the secret. She has hurt Fan. I 
am getting tired of Fan. Some day I will go away, but 
Jane hurt her and made her tiresome and she must be hurt 
too, before I go. But how? But how?” That was the 
difficulty. He must think of some way. And all the time 
he was sitting there thinking, he could hear Fan coughing 
and tossing in her room, and he could see her little tame 
chaffinches jumping about in their cage in the window. 
Fan was often like that, like a neat little bird flitting and 
hopping about, but now she was sick and ruffled and not 
gay and chirpy at all. 


XIII 


I COME now to the night of old Frangois’s ball that he 
gave for his daughter Bianca, that dreadful night of 
climax and exposure when the fabric of appearance 
was torn to shreds and we were left there, betrayed by 
ourselves to the eye of God, stark naked in all our sense¬ 
less passion and trivial brutality. The experience of that 
night stands up for me out of the past bald and glaring in 
all its garish savagery like a totem pole in a glittering desert. 
I circle round it. The habits and tastes of civilization ap¬ 
pear there like a mirage. I see the actors of the drama 
behaving like primitive creatures possessed by demons. 
Civilization skin deep? The banality is apt here. I have 
called Philibert and Bianca the spoiled darlings and perfect 
exponents of an ultra-refined social system, and so they 
were, but that didn’t prevent their behaving like a cave man 
and woman. The only difference was that they knew what 
they were doing. They were calculating and deliberate and 
amused. They turned loose the reckless savagery with the 
little dry laugh of knowledge. 

I did not go to the ball myself. I had been away, had 
come back unexpectedly, and had found myself by some 
extraordinary mischance, some curious combination of cir¬ 
cumstances, locked out of my rooms and without a key. 
It was late. I remember being unwilling to rouse my 
mother at that time of night, and standing in the street 
wondering which one of my friends I would ask for a 
bed, I don’t know why I suddenly decided to go to Phili¬ 
bert’s. I had never spent a night in his house in my life, 
but now, as if Paris were suddenly an unknown city of 
strangers and his roof the only prospect of shelter, I 

159 


160 Jane—Our Stranger 

found my way in a fiacre to his bleak and imposing door. 

I remember the emptiness of the house as I entered, the 
great silent entrance hall with its sleepy porter, and the 
coldness of the wide marble stairway and my unwillingness 
in spite of the solicitations of a couple of men servants to 
go to bed anywhere in any one of the blank luxurious rooms 
offered to me, until Philibert or Jane came home to authorize 
me to do so. “Monsieur et Madame would undoubtedly be 
very late,” the footman told me, “they were ‘chez Monsieur 
le due,’ where there was a ball.” I listened vaguely, ac¬ 
cepted a tray of refreshments and sent the men to bed, say¬ 
ing that I would wait up for the master. But the wine 
and biscuits placed in the library did not tempt me to ease 
or somnolence. I felt restless and oppressed. How big 
the place was to house a man and a woman and a child. 
What a distance to little Genevieve’s nursery. I picked up 
a book, put it down. A long mirror opposite me reflected a 
portion of the great high shadowy room and my own small 
wizened figure seated like a gnome in a circle of light. The 
sight of myself, always unpleasant, set me wandering. I 
turned on lights here and there. All was still and smooth 
with the vast ordered beauty of a cold enchanted palace. 
The thought of Philibert’s success as a house decorator 
passed through my mind without engaging my attention, 
that seemed somehow to be fixed on something else, some¬ 
thing deep and elusive that had a meaning could I but find 
it. What did they stand for, those high polished walls 
with their lovely panellings? What did they enclose be¬ 
yond so many treasures of art? The rare still air in those 
gleaming spaces seemed to have a quality, a presence, cold, 
enigmatic, and final. I tiptoed round the immense deserted 
salons like a thief. I waited and waited with a growing 
sense of the ominous, and then at last I heard the whirr of 
a motor coming into the porte cochere, and going out along 
the gallery to the great wide shadowy stairhead, I looked 
down and saw the light flash out, filling the vast white lower 
hall, and saw Jane come in alone, trailing her long gleam- 


Jane—Our Stranger 161 

ing draperies behind her, and advance across that expanse 
of marble like a woman in a trance, holding up and out in 
her hand before her, well away from her as if she were 
afraid of it, a small object that I identified when she had 
almost reached the top of those interminable stairs as a 
small dead bird with a jewelled pin run through its body. 

She spoke in a queer tired voice that grated slightly. 

“I found it in the car, on the cushion. Ivanoff must have 
put it there. It is one of Fan’s birds. A chaffinch—you 
see— He meant it as a symbol.” 

It was as if her teeth were almost chattering, and she were 
controlling that shaking of jaws with an effort. And as 
she spoke, I saw Ivanoff distinctly, taking that tiny feath¬ 
ered thing out of its cage and wringing its neck with his 
strong brown fingers, and smiling* through his slits of 
eyes. Jane continued to hold it out before her and stared 
at it. Presently she said again in that queer rasping voice— 

“Look, it’s quite dead. It has been speared through the 
heart. The pin is one I gave Fan years ago. The bird is 
her pet chaffinch. My Aunt Patience used to tame chaf¬ 
finches. There was one that used to perch on her head 
while she worked. That was in St. Mary’s Plains.” 

She stopped and looked at me a moment in silence en¬ 
quiringly. We were standing at the head of the stairs. 
Something in my face must have arrested her attention. 
“Come,” she said in a sudden tone of command. “Come 
into the drawing room. We will wait together for Phili¬ 
bert.” She said the last three words much more loudly 
than the others. They seemed to go rolling down the long 
gallery like rattling stones. I remember thinking that she 
must be very ill and that I ought to persuade her to go to 
bed. We moved in the direction of the drawing rooms. 
She was dressed in some shining glittering sheathlike thing 
of a silvery tone and wore emeralds in her ears and on her 
hands. Her eyes were as green as her earrings, and her 
face the colour of yellowish white wax. She dragged a 
chinchilla cloak after her as if it were terribly heavy. 


162 Jane—Our Stranger 

It had slipped off her shoulders and I noticed that her skin 
was covered with little beads of moisture. I thought— 
“The Lady of the Seas.” She looked as if she had been in 
an accident—been wounded somewhere. I half expected to 
see a red spot spreading over her side as she let fall her 
cloak in the great drawing room and turned on, one after 
another, a blazing circle of lights. The effect was startling. 
There was no stain of blood on her gown, but the livid 
pallor of her face and arms in that glare of light suggested 
that she was all the same in the state of one who had all 
but bled to death. Under the glittering lustre of many 
crystals, her face was a gaunt mask of yellowish bone and 
pale greenish shadow, and her lips were drawn tight across 
gleaming teeth. Her expression was famished, thirsty, 
breathless. 

I was frightened, and at the same time strangely excited 
Where was Philibert? What was the meaning of Jane’s 
feverish icy glitter? Why were we there, she and I, at 
three o’clock in the morning, transfixed in a blaze of arti¬ 
ficial light in a room that was as inimical as a palace in 
Hell? As she turned away and moved to the mantelpiece, 
where she stood with her back to me, leaning her elbows 
on the black carved marble, I had a moment’s respite. What 
did she want me for? Wouldn’t Philibert think it queer 
our waiting up for him in such ridiculous solemnity. I 
addressed her long shining back. 

“Do you often wait up for him?” She turned half way 
round. 

“No, but tonight we must wait, we must wait until we 
know.” 

Her words gave me a feeling of weakness. I was obliged 
to sit down. All that light, all that gleaming parquet, 
all those precious cabinets, full of rare glimmering treasures, 
and the night outside, wheeling towards day, and Philibert 
coming from somewhere in a motor, and all the people of 
Paris sleeping, quite still, in their beds but being whirled 


Jane—Our Stranger 163 

through space on a turning globe, made me dizzy. I heard 
her say from a great distance— 

“Fan is not dead. She was at the ball. She avoided me. 
She looked very ill. Ivanoff wanted to frighten me. I 
would have been, if I hadn’t been more frightened by some¬ 
thing else. Fan was my friend, so was Bianca. I have no 
friends now. It is very strange to be quite alone when 
things are going to happen.” 

“What is going to happen?” I tried to speak naturally. 

“I don’t know. We must wait. We will find out.” 

She came across to me and then looked at me shyly. It 
was suddenly as if she had come to herself again, and 
whereas she had seemed terribly old, as old as a deathless 
woman of some strange legend, she was now for a moment 
merely young and helpless and unhappy. 

“You will be a friend to me, won’t you?” she asked drop¬ 
ping into a chair before me. I nodded, unable to speak. 

And so we sat on in the centre of that immense room in 
two gilt fauteuils under the full glare of the chandelier. 
Occasionally she said something, then would sink into silence 
and seem to forget that I was there. But each time that 
the clock on the mantelpiece struck the quarter or the half 
hour she would start convulsively. 

At a quarter to four she said—“Ivanoff meant me to feel 
that I had broken Fan’s heart, but Fan is all right. I saw 
her. She looked quite happy tonight and she danced con¬ 
tinually. What does that mean—a broken heart? What 
makes one feel pain in one’s left side when one is unhappy? 
Just the power of suggestion? Perhaps if that power were 
strong enough it would affect the actual heart in one’s body, 
make it burst in one’s side.” Then without transition, “I 
would have sent for my Aunt Patience, but I did not want 
her to know. I was safe in her house. Sometimes I think 
of the Grey House as the only safe place in the world. If I 
went back there now, I wonder if I would feel the same, or 
whether it would seem very small and stuffy and shabby. 


164 Jane—Our Stranger 

My people there were very simple people. They loved me. 
They were all very religious except my Aunt Patty who be¬ 
lieved in science. One ought to believe in something—I 
don’t. I can’t. I joined the Catholic Church to please 
Philibert but I don’t believe. If my Aunt Beth knew she 
would worry about my eternal life. I wonder if I would 
find that a nuisance or just the most touching thing in the 
world. I wonder if they would all look like funny old 
frumps or seem quite beautiful. One can’t tell.” 

Her voice stopped. We sat in a silence that grew steadily 
more tense and unbearable. The clock struck four and she 
started to her feet, and a spasm twisted her features and 
she began to talk very rapidly while at the same time she 
seemed to be panting for breath. 

“I have found out tonight. I found out at the ball. It 
was like a revelation from heaven. I saw it all in a blind¬ 
ing burst. The noise of the music, the crowd, pale faces 
wheeling round me, bobbing ducking, they couldn’t hide 
it from me. Bianca was there, at the centre, cold, sharp, 
like a silver needle, watching Philibert, drawing him to her 
like a magnet. Every one was there. I was alone. I 
saw Fan in the distance. She avoided me, but I heard her 
coughing and her high little voice crying out through her 
hacking cough to some one—‘Yes, my dear, I’m dying. 
Why not? 39 of fever, but I simply had to come. What’s 
a woman’s life worth if she can’t dance.’ And then that 
cough again. Every one danced interminably. I saw Aunt 
Clothilde sitting like a bronze fountain with a watershed of 
grey silk spreading all round her, in a corner of the library; 
she was saying witty things in her squeaky voice to solemn 
old men in wigs. I stood alone in a window, watching 
Bianca watch Philibert. I must have spoken to a number 
of people, I don’t remember. Hands reached for mine, 
voices murmured, voices addressed me by name. Other 
voices laughed and whispered and cried out round me. The 
music throbbed. Faces whirled past. Some women 
shrieked and giggled out in the garden. Waiters and foot- 


Jane—Our Stranger 165 

men moved about. Motors hooted in the street. The 
waves of darkness welled up behind me to meet the waves 
of light rolling out of the hot rooms. I was cold, cold as 
ice, my face burning. Some one going past shouted at 
me, T say, you look ghastly. Have something?’ I didn’t 
answer. I was watching Bianca. Bianca was my friend— 
I loved her. I watched men and women approach her, touch 
her fingers, move away. I watched other men circle round 
her, keep coming back, hang forward humbly, shoulders 
hunched, heads bowed, waiting for a word from her, fasci¬ 
nated men who desired and pleased her. Philibert was 
among them, but he didn’t hang forward bowing. He stood 
near her, twirling his moustaches, talking to one and then 
another, making gestures, laughing, frowning, snubbing peo¬ 
ple, being impertinent, being amusing, flattering old 
dowagers, glaring at presumptuous youths, criticizing 
women with his cold eyes, and every now and then exchang¬ 
ing a look with Bianca. They scarcely spoke to each 
other, but I could see their communion was uninterrupted. 
I saw and understood— He has always loved her. They 
have always been together like that, always. That is what 
I have found out, and more, more. It was so before I 
came, before he met me, while we were engaged, when we 
were married, always Bianca, she was always there. 

“Tonight I saw them together, perfectly. I watched 
them. I wanted to fathom them, to know what it was they 
possessed between them. I knew it was evil. I longed 
to know their evil. The sight of Bianca roused in me a 
horrible envy. I stood like a stone watching her. She 
used to be my friend—I loved her. Evil appeared to me 
upon her face beautiful, shining out like a sickly light, 
potent, alluring. Suddenly I heard a squeaky voice say— 
"Come here, child. You shouldn’t show yourself with a face 
like that. If it’s so bad lock yourself up. Men are all 
brutes. Some day you won’t care.’ I looked at your 
Aunt Clothilde, blind with rage, you know, blind, and turned 
and went out through the window into the garden. At the 


166 Jane—Our Stranger 

far end in the dark I walked up and down alone. The 
music and the light streamed out of the long windows. I 
saw innumerable heads bobbing. It looked like a mad¬ 
house. Philibert and Bianca were in there together, cool, 
sane, infinitely wise. I was the insane person. At one 
o’clock I went in again and crossed to where Philibert stood 
beside Bianca and asked him if he were ready to come home. 
Bianca was in white. She was almost naked. She had a 
cloud of white round her and her body was as visible through 
it as a silver lily through water. She looked fresh and 
cool as dew. Philibert answered but did not look at me. 
'You need not wait,’ was what he said, but I was watching 
Bianca’s face and I saw there something else. Her eyes 
were wide open. They poured their meaning into mine. 
Her face was like a still white flower holding two drops of 
deadly poison. She did not move. She did not smile. It 
was all in her eyes. I looked down into them for an in¬ 
stant, one instant. It was enough. I had a feeling as I 
turned away of coming up out of a great depth, of breaking 
a spell. The Duke took me through the rooms to the top of 
the stairs. I walked beside him, my hand on his arm. I 
didn’t look back. I left them together. 

“I found Ivanoff’s dead bird in the car. It didn’t 
frighten me. But I was frightened. I felt as I drove 
away like some one who has had a narrow escape, a very 
close shave. Why? What was it? Nothing had happened, 
nothing visible, nothing to disturb the still immensity of 
the spell-bound avenue. I drove on alone, up the Champs 
Elysees. The sky was studded like a shield with hard 
pointed stars. The double row of roundheaded lamps lin¬ 
ing the black gleaming surface of the pavement stood like 
sentinels put there to conduct me out through the Arc de 
Triomphe into desolate uncharted space. I held Ivanoff’s 
dead bird in my hand, and I felt as if I were driving away 
from that crowded ball room straight over the rim of the 
earth. The sight of you here, at the top of the stairs brought 
me to my senses. I remembered. I understood on the in- 


Jane—Our Stranger 167 

stant of seeing you that I had wanted to kill Bianca, tonight. 
That was what had frightened me. That was my close 
shave. You stood there, worried and tired and kind. I 
recognized you.” 

Her voice stopped suddenly. She covered her face with 
her hands. I rose to my feet and took a step towards her, 
and just then the clock struck five and its little gilt angel 
stepped out with his tiny jewelled trumpet. She whirled 
towards it, lifting her face that was drawn like an old 
woman’s. 

“Philibert will not come ... I know now,” she whis¬ 
pered. “He has gone away with Bianca.” She swayed, 
looked this way and that around the wide gleaming room, 
them at me, holding out her hands. “Help me, Blaise.” 

In a moment she had given way to sobbing. Ah, then, 
then I, who had never touched so much as her hair or her 
cheek or the fold of her dress, then indeed, I would have 
taken her in my arms to comfort her, as one takes a child. 
But she was the great strong creature, I was the weakling. 
I could only kneel by her chair and try to steady her con¬ 
vulsed frame and heaving shoulders with my own arm round 
them in futile incompetent anguish, while I heard her heart 
breaking as if it were so much strong stuff being splintered 
there in her side. 

It was six o’clock when she went to her room. The serv¬ 
ants were not yet about. The house was still, impenetrably 
calm, the curtains still drawn, the formality of its beauti¬ 
ful equanimity unchanged. 

Six o’clock; Bianca and Philibert were well on their 
way by that time, travelling south, rolling smoothly along 
over long white roads between mysterious poplars in a misty 
dawn. They had provisions with them in the car. I can 
see them now as I think back, opening a bottle of cham¬ 
pagne, eating sandwiches, and I can hear their laughter. 
They were very gay, very pleased with the way they had 
done it. They had walked straight out of Frangois’ house 
together at three thirty in the morning, had stepped into 


168 Jane—Our Stranger 

the motor in the presence of a crowd of departing guests, 
and had disappeared. The audacity of the thing was of a 
kind to tickle them immoderately. They must have laughed 
a good deal. I wonder that Jane and I, spellbound under 
that glaring chandelier, didn’t hear them. Strange that the 
echoes of their light laughter didn’t travel back to us across 
that widening distance, while we waited and listened. 
Strange to think of that old roue Francois wandering back 
through his emptied rooms, among the debris of that night’s 
festival, all unsuspecting. Very curious to think of Phili¬ 
bert and Bianca murmuring to each other, their laughter 
giving way to the bitter and exultant growling of their 
excited senses, while I led Jane back to her room. No one 
saw her go tottering down the hall leaning against me. No 
one saw her swollen face looking through the door and 
trying to smile at me before she closed herself in alone. 


PART II 










t 









I 


T HAT was long ago. We were young then. What 
a haunting annoying phrase. One meets it every¬ 
where, in books, on people’s lips, or unspoken in 
their eyes. The other day in the Grey House, sitting op¬ 
posite Jane in the shabby little parlour, there it was again. 
She spoke it, but not wistfully, more with relief than regret. 
I stayed ten days in St. Mary’s Plains and during those 
days she told me the rest of the story, bit by bit, till she 
came to the end—I put it down now as she told it—what 
follows are her own words as I remember them. 

That was the end of my youth and the beginning of 
life. Until then I had been made use of, but after that I 
acted and I became responsible for myself. 

Fifteen years ago, we sat till morning waiting for Phili¬ 
bert. I no longer remember what I felt. Have you tried 
to recall sensations of pain, and by thinking very closely 
about all the little circumstances surrounding them, to ex¬ 
perience again the stab or the ache? One can’t. I can’t 
feel again that agony. I suppose it was agony. You re¬ 
member it better than I do, for you saw it. One remembers 
things one has seen and things one did, but not what went 
on inside one’s own dark, impenetrable body and soul, invisi¬ 
bly. I remember what I did at that time and what I said and 
what other people said and looked. I remember your face, 
and Jinny’s fear of me, and her fretting for her father, 
and Fan’s coming and saying that I looked like a mad 
woman, and from these facts I deduce the other fact that I 
was suffering, but I have forgotten the feeling. That is very 
strange when you come to think of it, for how, then, can I 
know that it was so? I don’t know. It is all merely con- 

171 


172 Jane—Our Stranger 

jecture. One would have thought, from the way I behaved 
and the way it changed everything that my emotion of that 
time was tremendous; was immensly important. But it 
wasn’t. It had no substance. It didn’t stand the test of time. 
It has vanished completely. Other things have lasted. 

What are these feelings, emotions, passions that we make 
such a fuss about? Nothing but sparks struck from an 
impact, a collision of some kind. They seem to burn us up, 
to consume us for a moment, then they vanish. They have 
no body, no staying power, no reality, but we mould our 
lives by them. 

I am a woman. My life has always centred about people. 
In tracing the course of events, I find that their causes were 
invariably personal— My life is a long strong twisted rope 
made up of a number of human relationships, nothing 
more. There was first my mother, and my Aunt Patience, 
then Philibert, Bianca and Genevieve. Philibert went away. 
I did without him. One can do without anything,—every¬ 
thing. I am proving it now. But Pianca kept coming 
back; I never got rid of her. 

My life is a failure. It is finished. It is there in its 
dreadful, unchangeable completeness spread out before me. 
I look at it, as I would look at a map, and when I think that 
it is I who made it, this thing called a human life, I am be¬ 
wildered and ashamed. How did it come about that I made 
so many mistakes, and did so much that was harmful to 
others ? There was no desire in my heart to hurt, no will to 
do wrong. On the contrary I wanted to make people happy, 
I wanted to do right. It is very strange. It is almost as if 
the intensity of my will to do right forced me to do the 
wrong thing. Is there some explanation? Is there a key 
to the problem of living that I never found ? Or was it all 
simply due to Bianca? My Aunt Beth used to say that the 
only way to live rightly was to do the will of God. But 
what does that mean ? How is one to know what the will of 
God is? Often I wonder whether my failure is due to my 
never having found out about God. Most of my people here 


Jane—Our Stranger 173 

in America would not hesitate to say yes—but I am not sure. 
It seems to me that I was even more eager to do His will 
than I would have been if I had been certain of His exist¬ 
ence. It would have been an immense relief to me to have 
known that God was in His Heaven and that I did not have 
to bother about my own soul. “Put your troubles on the 
Lord,” our parson used to say in St. Mary’s Plains. Well— 
I don’t know. That is a solution for many. If they do that 
—just shelve everything and go by texts in the Bible for their 
order of daily conduct, living must be very much simplified 
—but I couldn’t do that. Something stiff and hard and 
honest in me wouldn’t allow it. I couldn’t believe that I 
could talk to God and ask His opinion. I used to try—when 
1 was a child and when I was a woman. Praying was like 
whispering into a chasm, a void, an echoing emptiness. My 
questions came back to me, unanswered, mocking echoes of 
my own tormented soul. 

So I floundered along. 

I do not excuse myself. I am to blame. I am responsible. 
I know that. I lived among charming people. I had, as 
people say, almost everything heart can desire. My husband 
did not love me, but beyond that what had I to complain of? 
I had money, health, power, friends. I was one of the for¬ 
tunate. Hundreds of women, no doubt, envied me. 

I hadn’t the gift of living. Your mother has it, so has 
your sister. It is common among French people, they are 
artists in life, but I was for ever looking beyond life for its 
purpose, and thus missing its savour and its meaning. The 
people I loved were too important to me and the people I 
hated—but I can see now that Bianca wasn’t as interesting 
or as important as she seemed. She was only a vain and 
selfish woman after all. But she was for twenty years my 
obsession. 

I must talk about Bianca. It was really in order to talk 
about Bianca that I asked you to come, for I am not yet rid of 
her. She haunts me here in this innocent old house. Enig¬ 
matic in death as she was in life, her personality persists, ex- 


i74 Jane—Our Stranger 

quisite and depraved and relentless. She comes to accuse 
me. Having ruined my life, she accuses me of her death. 

I did not kill her. Some of you thought that I did. You 
didn’t mind. You didn’t blame me, but you thought so. 
Ludovic, I am sure, is convinced of it, and if he does not 
precisely approve, he at least accepts the fact as the inevita¬ 
ble outcome of our long exhausting duel. More than once 
he told me that until I could rid myself of the obsession of 
Bianca, I should be unable to understand the first little thing 
about life. He was the one person who understood my feel¬ 
ing for her and hers for me. In his uncanny wisdom, so de¬ 
void of all prejudice, he knew that our hatred was based 
upon an intense mutual attraction, and that we hounded each 
other to death because under other circumstances we would 
have loved each other. The long and dreary spectacle of 
two women hating each other for years with intense sym¬ 
pathy, or if you like, loving each other with an exasperating 
antagonism and hatred, was to him pitiful and contemptible. 
',He would have had me put an end to if somehow, anyhow, 
at any cost. Taking another’s life is to him no crime com¬ 
pared to ruining one’s own. Well, it is at an end now. 
Bianca is dead, and I am buried alive. We did each other 
in, but it took twenty years, and I never touched her with 
my hands, or did anything to bring about her death, save will 
her to die. 

And her death came too late to do me or mine any good. 
Philibert was finished. My life was in pieces. There was 
nothing left to patch up. She had come between me 
and my husband and child, while living, but her death 
cut me off from them, more absolutely than anything 
she could have done alive. And, fiendishly, as if with 
consummate cunning, she died mysteriously leaving with 
me the unanswerable question, as to whether or not, 
I had made her kill herself. I go over and over it all, day 
after day, week in, week out. I remember my last view of 
her alive, in that hotel corridor, the look she gave me over 
her drooping shoulder, leaning against the half open door, 


Jane—Our Stranger 175 

her hand on the door knob, her long languid weight on it, 
one pointed foot trailing, and on her grey face, a desperate 
vindictive longing, a wistful cruelty, a question, a threat, a 
prayer. Was she at last imploring me? Did she in that 
moment remember everything? Was she mutely and bit¬ 
terly asking me to come and hear her confession? Would 
it all have been put right by some miracle had I gone to her 
before it was too late? I don’t know—I shall never know. 
I only know that our wills clashed again for the last time, 
that for the last time I resisted her, and let' her drag the in¬ 
credible weight of her diseased and disappointed spirit out 
of my sight, for ever. 

And how am I to know that her death wasn’t an accident, 
and that her look of desperate appeal wasn’t just such a 
piece of acting as she had treated me to, at intervals for 
twenty years ? Over and over again, she had done the same 
trick. Invariably, after one of her pieces of devilry, she 
would approach me with that wistful penitent masque, and 
stir me to forgiveness and compassion. Repeatedly, she 
fooled me. I could save her—I could influence her for 
good. I was strong and balanced and sane. If only I 
would give her what she needed, what she lacked, some re¬ 
lief from herself in some external thing, some faith, some 
definite obstinate purpose, beyond the gratification of her 
own vanity. 

And each time I believed, each time I forgave, each time 
looking into her wonderful face, I thought I saw there, a 
spiritual meaning. It is enough to make one scream with 
laughter. It was all acting. It must have been. It was all 
done for the purpose of tormenting me more exquisitely aft¬ 
erwards. For years she fooled me—for years I wouldn’t 
believe she was what she was, a woman of immense person¬ 
ality and no character, but I am at last certain that this was 
so. Ludovic says that it takes as strong a character to be 
really wicked as really good. He used to rave over Bianca, 
to anger me, I suppose, call her perversely —“une femme ad¬ 
mirable—la plus courageuse damnee quil avait jamais vue.” 


176 Jane—Our Stranger 

I don’t agree with him. I do not mean that Bianca had a 
weak character. I mean literally that she had no character 
at all. Where one feels in the average human being, the 
strong resisting kernel, the stern spiritual centre that con¬ 
tains identity there in Bianca there was nothing. At the 
middle centre of her being there was emptiness. She had, 
morally, no core. She was as formless as one of those 
genii in the Arabian Nights who came out of Ali Baba’s 
earthenware pots. 

I ought to know, for I loved her. She was my friend 
during the happiest years of my life, when I believed in Phili¬ 
bert, and was confident. I say it again, we were friends. 
I believe even now, in our early friendship, in those 
days, Bianca was actually, and much to her own sur¬ 
prise, fond of me. That she began being nice to me out of 
a spirit of mischief is no doubt true. The idea of making 
Philibert’s wife, her intimate, was the sort of thing likely to 
appeal to her but having made the advances out of per¬ 
versity, she found herself interested and attracted. Why 
did she like me ? It is difficult to say. Perhaps because I 
was a new type and one that wouldn’t in the ordinary course 
of events come her way. I puzzled her. To her I was 
something primitive, savage, and dangerous. She used to 
call me her “Peau Rouge.” She said I made her think of 
Buffaloes and Bison and prehistoric animals, of black men 
round camp fires in jungles, of snake dancers and deserts 
and the infantile magic of savage races. She wove stories 
about me and hunted up old prints of queer outlandish peo¬ 
ple who she insisted had my type of head. I was, she as¬ 
serted, only half-tame, and being with me gave her the same 
kind of pleasure as having a leopard about. She was physi¬ 
cally afraid of me. Not only at the beginning, but always 
to the very end, but in those days, my losing my temper, she 
found, “un tres beau spectacle.” Her blue eyes would shine, 
her lips part in amazement, and timidly she would stroke 
my shoulder, murmuring—“How wonderful you are. What 
a volcano.” 


Jane—Our Stranger 177 

She used to ask me endless questions about my childhood 
and appeared greatly intrigued by my obstinate attachment 
to what she affectionately termed, my ridiculous impossible 
background. She would make me tell her about life in the 
Grey House, the baking of cakes in the kitchen, the hymn 
singing on Sunday evenings, and the summer trips to the 
wilderness, to the woods of Canada, or across the prairies 
of Omaha, Dakota, and Arizona. She would lie on her 
couch in her boudoir making patterns in the air with her 
lovely fingers and purring like a pleased little cat while 1 
described the plains, stretching endlessly under the sky to 
the white horizon, the lonely wooden shacks blistered in the 
sun, and infested with flies, the lazy cowboys on indefati¬ 
gable loping broncos—and she would murmur— “Ah, je 
comprends cela—c est grand, c’est monstruenx, c’est beau ” 

As for me, need I explain why I loved her? Who has 
not felt the quality of her beauty? What man or woman 
that ever saw Bianca, failed to respond to the peculiar pene¬ 
trating charm of her personality? I see her in memory, a 
vivid creature, perfect, compact, clear in the midst of a 
crowd of blurred and colourless shadows. Her beauty was 
incisive, keen. It cut into one’s consciousness sharp as 
a stab. It stamped itself on one’s brain, indelible and cer¬ 
tain. I see her face as clearly today as I saw it the day I 
first laid eyes on her when she came up to me in your 
mother’s salon and said—“You must like me, I insist.” It 
is there close to me, rising out of the grave as pure, as firm, 
as precisely drawn as if I held the perfect indestructible 
masque in my hand. 

I see her eyes open lazily, wider and wider, and shine out 
suddenly, bluest blue, so blue that they seem to send out a 
blue light through their black lashes. Ah, how lovely she 
was! How could I not believe in that loveliness ? Blue, 
brilliant fire-blue eyes set far apart under a fringe of black 
hair and pointed curving thin red lips. I could model her 
now exactly—the cup of her small chin, her long round 
white throat, flat bosom and shoulders flowing down thin 


178 Jane—Our Stranger 

arms to her narrow beautiful hands. Her body was a 
fragile thing, strong as steel. 

And women of Bianca’s breeding never give themselves 
away in ordinary life. They are closed and secret books, 
open only to those who have the key. No one can read 
them who is not of the initiated. I did not know the lan¬ 
guage. There was nothing about her to convey to me that 
she was anything more than she seemed, a remarkable and 
gifted woman of great distinction, a creature so refined as to 
seem to me to belong to another planet from the one on 
which I had been born. It seemed to me extraordinary that 
such a person should notice me at all. I was filled with 
gratitude. I was humble, devoted, flattered, and Philibert 
gave no sign. If not actually enthusiastic about our friend¬ 
ship, he still seemed content enough, and I was happy in the 
thought, that this wonderful woman who had been his com¬ 
rade from childhood was now, my friend too. 

And she was careful, as we grew more intimate, to show 
me, only those aspects of herself that she knew would flatter 
and delight me. Never did she mention subjects likely to 
frighten me. Her talk was all of art shows and music and 
books and the ridiculous absurdities of “le monde” and those 
things in her life that I couldn’t help noticing with concern, 
she explained in a way to enlist my sympathy. She was 
desperately unhappy, she told me, in her marriage, her hus¬ 
band’s immorality was a great grief to her; the sorrow of 
her life was, that she could have no children and so on, and 
so on. Once she even confided to me that there was in¬ 
sanity in her family, and that she was constantly haunted by 
the fear of going insane. I was, at this, in a tumult of 
sympathy. I was prepared to forgive her a far greater 
number of eccentricities than she ever showed me. 

She was, she told me, of a mixed strain of southern 
blood, a Venetian on her mother’s side, on her father’s a 
Provengale. From her I learnt that the old Duke, her 
father, was descended from the Comtes de Provence of a 
line that had numbered kings in the middle ages. For 


Jane—Our Stranger 179 

many generations they had been Seigneurs of a wild and 
mountainous region north of Avignon. Their fortress, the 
“Chateau des Trois Maries” stands high against the sky on 
a spur of rock that reaches out from the ragged hills, above 
the wide valley of the Rhone. This was Bianca’s home. 
There in that sad and wonderful country of brown sunlight, 
she was as nearly happy as she could ever be on earth. I 
went to Provence with her one summer. And now that she 
is dead, I think of her, not as she was in Paris, languid, 
perverse, and irritable, but as she was in her own country. 
I see her against the swarthy background of those ruined 
hills scarred by the hordes of invading Saracens. Her little 
person seems to ride above that sunbaked land of blistered 
roads and dry river beds, on the wings of legend through 
a burning and sanguinary past of repeated invasions; of 
Barbary pirates from across the sea to the south, and Visi¬ 
goths from the north, of wandering Bohemians, of steady 
marching Roman armies, of Popes flying from Italy for 
refuge, of gentle saints stranded in tiny boats on the desolate 
marshy shores of the Camargue and I see her as she ought 
to have been and as she was sometimes, down there, her 
face brown, her blue eyes flashing, and her thin body, lean 
and hard, mounted on one of the small fleet horses of the 
country, galloping at the head of the thundering fighting 
bulls towards the arenas of Nimes or Arles. This was her 
proper setting. It was here at the Chateau des Trois 
Maries that she showed herself to me, as she would have 
been had she not been accursed. 

I remember one day in her room in the west tower of 
the Castle, her talking of herself, as she never talked to 
me before or since, honestly, as honestly as she could, and 
with light laughter breaking into her short light biting 
phrases. From the high window we could see the white 
dust of the road whirling down the valley before the hot 
scurrying wind, groves of poplars bending their plumed 
heads, little brown houses surrounded by close vineyards 
huddled behind screens of cypress trees. 


180 Jane—Our Stranger 

‘‘I was born here/’ she said, “of a woman who loathed 
her husband and hated this country—but I wasn’t really 
born—I was made by witches one hot windy midsummer 
day. They made me out of the burning sun and the shriek¬ 
ing mistral and the hot white dust, in the black shade of 
cypresses, and they added to the hot mixture, ice water 
from that mountain stream; then they each laid on me a 
curse. One said, the oldest and wickedest—'She will covet 
the earth, but only love herself. The second said ‘She will 
be haunted by the evil spirits of dead men/ The third 
said—'‘Since the people of this country are fond of wild 
jokes and pranks,—they are you know, tres blagueurs, les 
Provenqaux, she will be much given to playing mischievous 
jokes that will do others harm/ Then they left me in the 
dark cypress grove, where my mother who was wandering 
about and longing for the laughter and music of her Italy, 
found me. She, poor darling, invoked the three Marys for 
my protection, les Saintes Maries de la Mer who are carved 
in the stone over the great door, Marie Salome, Marie Jacobe 
and Marie Madeleine; their shrine is in the grotto behind 
the house—but they had been shipwrecked themselves and 
were too inefficient to cope with my witches—and so that 
you see is what I am—burning hot and icy cold, and with a 
dry wind, shrieking in my heart, and three times accursed. 
I feel it. I know it. I have known it since I was a child— 
At first I struggled, then gave in, took my curses in my arms 
and made them mine, made them, I tell you—my religion—” 
She gave her dry laugh. Her voice was high and sweet 
and careless. She spoke, without passion, in her dry con¬ 
versational tone. “If I could never love any one but myself, 
never forget myself, try as I might in excesses of every kind, 
then I would love myself utterly. If I was to be haunted 
by the unfulfilled ideas of men and women long dead, then 
I would give myself up to those ideas, and if my pranks 
were fated to do people harm, well—what business was it 
of mine? I would enjoy doing people harm—idiots that 
they are, why should I care for their thin silly feelings? 


Jane—Our Stranger 181 

“You think I am talking nonsense. If you believed me, 
you would be horrified— eh, bien —be horrified—but you will 
never understand. You will never believe that I am as bad 
as I am. That is the reason I like you—that is the reason 
I talk to you. You are obstinate and faithful and strong—• 
and beside that you have demons too—I see them in your 
awful sullen face that I like. 

“I tell you—that I am used by ideas that are not my own 
—that do not come out of my own head, that come to me 
from I know not where. They come persistently—out of 
the sky, circling back again and again like black birds com¬ 
ing out of the sky to this tower. For instance; an idea comes 
to me that I must go to Nimes and see a certain matador and 
send for him and make him love me—I know he will be 
stupid and coarse and disgusting, and I refuse. Then 
things happen. Every day lines appear in the papers—his 
name is everywhere, in every village on every stable wall—I 
laugh—and give in—and it is all stale and horrid before it 
begins, but the idea had to be carried out. That you will 
say is just the stupid giving into caprice of any idle woman 
—but it is not always so ordinary. Suppose that some day 
the idea comes to me that I must entice my husband into 
the oubliette. I laugh at the idea and chase it away. Six 
months later it comes back more insistent, a thing with a 
voice. It says ‘Get him into the north tower. He is a 
mean creature. He will fall down the oubliette’—and I say 
peevishly—’‘But I don’t mind his being alive—he doesn’t 
bother me, I am not interested in killing him’ and again I 
drive away the idea—but it will come back, it will keep com¬ 
ing back till it is satisfied. There have been many ideas 
like that demanding of me to be satisfied. Sooner or later 
I carry them out—do their bidding. Often in hours of 
lucidity I see how dangerous they are. I fight against them, 
distract myself with some idiocy or run away—take the 
train, go in the opposite direction—but almost always I 
give in, in the end.” She stopped. I see her now against 
the stone coping of the window, leaning out—her head in 


182 Jane—Our Stranger 

the sun—looking down—the wall fell sheer—a hundred feet 
of masonry and rock. “Sometimes I think I will throw my¬ 
self down to get rid of them, these ideas of men and 
women whose restless bones are the hot dust of these moun¬ 
tains—but why should I—why give myself as a sacrifice? 
It would be silly—the people I will hurt if I live aren’t 
worth it—” 

She jerked back into the room and came to my side, lay¬ 
ing a hand on my shoulder, and standing so that I could 
not see her, a little behind me, her lips close to my ear. 
“There are other things/’ she whispered, “worse things— 
ideas—that I couldn’t tell—” Her fingers clutched my 
shoulder, tightening until they hurt me—“You help me, but 
sometimes I am angry with you for being what you are 
and want to hurt you. Some day, who knows, the idea 
may come to me to do you harm. You are safe now be¬ 
cause I don’t understand you, and feel you are stronger 
than I—but if I ever detected a weakness in you—or if you 
ever bored me, then I should hate you, then I would cer¬ 
tainly do you a hurt. It’s a warning—” she broke off with 
a laugh, kissed lightly the tip of my ear and left me. 

I was not afraid of her then—what she said did not dis¬ 
turb me. I laughed at it; I was happy and confident. I 
had everything in the world I wanted, and I lived in a daze 
of joy and excitement—Europe, Paris, the miracles pro¬ 
duced by my wealth, still dazzled and amazed me; going to 
bull-fights with Bianca, or hunting wild boar, with the old 
Duke, or attending the Courts of Rome, Vienna, Berlin or 
St. James’s with Philibert, everything was marvellous. I 
had no time to worry, and no reason to do so that I knew of. 

But I remembered what Bianca had said, and in the light 
of what happened, I understood that she had been speaking 
the truth. It was simply her way of admitting that she 
was a supreme egotist. Put simply, it meant that the one 
motive power in her, was her vanity. It was her vanity 
that held her together and gave her an outline. And as she 
grew older she developed it as other women develop a gift 


Jane—Our Stranger 183 

for music. She worshipped herself, and she made of her 
egotism an elaborate religion. Her adoration of herself 
grew into a passion and burned with the ardour of a saint’s 
miraculously revealed inspiration. She would have gone to 
the stake for it. It incased her in complete armour. No 
one and nothing could touch her through it. She was the 
only woman I have ever known who lived consistently and 
exclusively for herself, and she did so with the sustained 
passion of a religious maniac. One can only compare her 
to a Savanorola. 

Her vanity was her power and her curse. It was an ogre. 
It had to be fed. Human beings were thrown to it as to 
the devouring dragons in fairy tales. We were all victims. 
I was, and you were, and Philibert and Jinny, and Micky 
and Fan and all the others. Insatiable vanity, that was all 
there was to Bianca in the last analysis. That was all the 
meaning of her, but its manifestations, its results, its devious 
ways of arriving at its own ends, these were infinite, would 
fill volumes. 

You can see how the curse would operate. It operated 
through her intelligence. Had she been stupid, all would 
have been well, but concentrated on the study and care of 
herself, elaborating year after year her attentions to her¬ 
self, nursing her body, her face, her senses, supplying to 
herself stimulants and soothing preparations, searching for 
curious new sensations, she was aware of her own limited 
power to please herself. Distinctly she perceived something 
beyond her reach, a quality of experience outside her range, 
a beauty she could not attain. She would have liked best 
to have been a queen of love, whom all men adored, like the 
radiant Simonetta—fairy queen of Florence, beautifully 
worshipped by an entire population, and she only succeeded 
in being la femme fatale . With no gladness in her soul, 
she could not inspire gladness—always in the faces of her 
victims she saw a reflection of her own darkness. If oc¬ 
casionally, in the lurid light of the excitement she could so 
easily evoke, she saw in a man’s face a flash that resembled 


184 Jane—Our Stranger 

joy, ecstacy, delight, she as often saw it fade to a dismal stu¬ 
pidity, or rage or disgust. Impossible for her to create any¬ 
thing more than an imitation of bliss. Her egoism spoiled 
its own gratification. It contained poison. Her touch was 
magical and deadly. This, in the end, bored her. She used 
to complain exasperatedly of people being afraid of her. 
The care with which they succumbed disgusted her. Men 
grovelling at her feet, men writing sentimental verses, men 
touching her with clumsy hands; she came to loathe them. 
There was nothing in it; she wanted something else, some¬ 
thing out of the ordinary, something continually surprising, 
unexpected, dramatic. Alas! Humanity goes its stolid 
way comfortably enough in spite of the Biancas of the 
world. Men will “play up” to a certain point. They 
will pretend to be dying of love to please a beautiful 
lady’s caprice, but they won’t really die. One of the 
things Bianca longed for was to have a crop of suicides 
laid to her account. She would have been pleased had 
some of her victims blown their brains out, but somehow 
they didn’t. They only threatened to do so. Once out of 
her sight, they recovered the normal and sallied forth from 
her boudoir to enjoy fat beefsteaks. 

Her tragedy lay in understanding what she missed. She 
observed that inferior people experienced a range of feeling 
of which she was incapable. Insignificant women inspired 
the passions she longed to inspire. She envied and despised 
them. She envied every happy woman her happiness, every 
lover his love; her eyes watched them all, with curiosity, 
disdain and exasperation. 

What in me began, after our three years of harmony, to 
get on her nerves, was my monotonous and exclusive feeling 
for Philibert. That such a sentiment should continue to 
absorb me and satisfy me, after five years of marriage was 
too much for her. She became irritable and teasing. She 
began to make fun of my love for my husband. She called 
it stupid, vulgar, grotesque, indecent. I lost my temper, 
she grovelled, enjoying that, but when next we met she began 


Jane—Our Stranger 185 

again, professing an extraordinary merriment at the sight of 
my mawkish sentimentality. With a sudden flash of insight 
I accused her of envy. She grew livid. In a choking 
whisper, she told me that Philibert for his part was no 
such idiot and that all I had to do was to look about me 
to find out the truth. I left her in a rage and stayed away. 
I did not see her again until the night of her ball, some 
months later, to which I went, knowing that she had deter¬ 
mined to take Philibert away from me. It was the fact that 
Philibert as she believed had begun to care for me, that 
made her finally act. She simply couldn’t bear to think that 
Philibert and I should come to understand and truly care 
equally for each other. 

I went to her ball to make a scene, to frighten her into 
giving him back to me, but I did nothing. I didn’t speak to 
her. I didn’t go near her. I simply stood and watched her. 
The sight of her paralysed me. I realized that no man who 
had ever known and loved Bianca, could care for me. And 
I came away, knowing that between me and Philibert, every¬ 
thing was ended, and I came away terrified. As I left the 
house, I remember muttering to myself “I must escape”— 
“I must escape.” Escape from what? I don’t know. 
From them both, from what they had done, from what they 
stood for, from the world of treachery and deadly pleasure 
to which they belonged. 

But I did not get away. I never got away. I never 
escaped from Bianca. I never got out of range of the sense 
of her presence and of her infernal charm. I still cared 
for her. Hating her, I still wondered that she could have 
hurt me, still wept and called out to her in the dark at night 
to know why she had done it, still felt her to be the 
most fascinating woman I had ever known, and it was 
this that made my jealousy of Philibert unbearable and 
fiendish. I had been twice betrayed and I knew loving them 
both, and knowing them both, precisely the quality of the 
delight they had in each other. 

And I knew too, that Bianca was acting as she did be- 


186 Jane—Our Stranger 

cause of me—even more than because of Philibert. I was 
conscious and I was convinced that she was conscious that 
the real meaning of the whole thing lay in her feeling for me. 
There was between us, a relationship that had become hate¬ 
ful, but that was still going on, a thing that was going to en¬ 
dure, a mutual sympathy outraged and hideous now, but per¬ 
sisting. If she had only wanted Philibert—well, she had him 
already. No—what she wanted was to hurt me. And 
making all allowances for the attraction between them, had it 
not been for me, he would not have inspired her with a 
sufficient energy to bolt with him. The situation would 
have lacked that something peculiar and curious which she 
wanted, had she not felt as she did about me. 

But I may be confused between what I knew then and 
what I know now. It may be that I did not understand it 
all so well, then—I forget—I cannot recall my actual state 
of mind. I give less importance to my preoccuption with 
Philibert than I should do, and lay too much emphasis on 
Bianca, because you see, I have got over Philibert, the hurt 
he did me is long since past and I no longer care about it, 
but from Bianca—I have never recovered. She never let 
me go—she never finished with me. It wasn’t just one 
thing—it was a series of things stretching over years, a 
continual coming back. You see—in the last analysis it was 
because of me that she ran away with Philibert, broke Fan’s 
heart and laid schemes for corrupting Jinny—and these 
things took fifteen years to accomplish. There was war be¬ 
tween us for fifteen years. 

The story of my life is the story of my duel with Bianca. 
Other people played a part, other feelings absorbed me for 
long periods, other relationships endured, but my relation¬ 
ship to Bianca was the long strong rope that hanged me. 
You will see how it was. 

Why did she go on with it ? I don’t know. Unless it was 
that I never gave in. Had I collapsed after Philibert left 
me, she might have been satisfied—and satisfied, she would 
have lost interest in me—and I should have been saved. 


II 


I T is very difficult for me to recall my state of mind dur¬ 
ing the days that followed Philibert’s going off with her. 
I’ve an idea that I was in a kind of stupor, not much 
noticing anything. I must have given orders that no one 
was to be admitted, for I learned afterwards that Claire and 
your mother both called, and a number of other relatives. 
I think I remained in my room for a day or two lying on the 
bed with my clothes on and refusing to open the door to 
my maid. It was Jinny who roused me. The servants were 
frightened. The nurse brought her down and she pounded 
on the door with her little fists till I opened it, but when she 
saw me she gave a shriek and ran away from me and hid in 
her nurse’s petticoats. That brought me to my senses, my 
child’s fear and the servants’ faces. I had a bath and some¬ 
thing to eat. They brought me my letters obsequiously, and 
with furtive curiosity. I could hear the servants hanging 
about whispering. I imagined them talking, talking, end¬ 
lessly talking it over downstairs. They were strangers to 
me, Philibert’s servants, servants of that great, horrible house 
that I disliked. I had no reason to stay there now. Noth¬ 
ing kept me—I would go home to St. Mary’s Plains. 

I started a letter to my Aunt Patience, what was I to say 
to her? “My husband has run away with another woman. 
He never loved me. My mother married me to him for her 
own purposes. Now that she is dead there is no more reason 
to go on with this horrible farce. I am coming home. 
Something of that kind? No, I couldn’t. I stared at the 
words I had written—“My dearest Aunt Patty.” I seemed 
to see her sitting off there, at the end of that great distance, 
adjusting her spectacles, opening my letter with expectant 

187 


188 Jane—Our Stranger 

fingers. I saw the shabby room, the sunlight on the worn 
carpet, the littered writing desk, the piles of books, the 
stuffed birds in their glass cases. I saw my aunt an old 
woman, facing old age alone, with equanimity, following 
year after year the pursuit of knowledge, not afraid of time, 
not oppressed by solitude, going up to bed night after night 
in the empty house and kneeling down in her flannel dressing- 
gown beside her narrow white counterpane to pray to God, 
and remembering me always, never forgetting me, never 
leaving me alone. 

Once she had said, ‘‘When you’re in a hole, Jane, and don’t 
know what to do, you can always do the thing you hate doing 
most and you’ll probably not be far wrong.” 

Looking out of the window I became aware of Paris and 
I thought of those words. Paris! There it was streaming 
by, to the races. Was it aware of what had happened to 
me ? I wondered. Did people know that Bianca and Phili¬ 
bert had run away together like a couple of actors, like a 
pair of quite common people ? I imagined society agog with 
the scandal. I saw them gloating pitying. I heard women 
saying —“Cette pauvre femme, elle etait vraiment trop bete.” 
It seemed to me that every one in the street must be looking 
up at my windows with curiosity and derision. They were 
invading my privacy, pulling off from me the last decent 
covering of my dignity. Well, why sit there and bear it? 
Why suffer public humiliation? My eyes fell on my engage¬ 
ment book. I observed that Philibert and I were due for 
dinner that night at your Aunt Clothilde’s. I rang for my 
maid and told her to telephone Madame la Duchesse and say 
that although Monsieur, having been called out of town, 
would not be able to present himself at her dinner, I would 
come with pleasure, as had been arranged. My face in the 
glass seemed much as usual. I had done all my weeping 
with you, my poor Blaise, three nights before. Having 
made up my mind to go out I now experienced a certain 
relief. The coiffeur was summoned and the manicurist. 
Aunt Clo’s dinners were very special affairs, so I chose a 


Jane—Our Stranger 189 

nice dress, white, and put on an extra rope of pearls. As 
you know, my appearance created something of a sensation. 
I saw that at once. They had thought me already dead and 
buried, and were gossiping as I suspected, over my remains. 
My business for the moment was to show them that I was 
alive. 

Ah, but how dreary and trivial it all seems now. Why? 
Why? What earthly difference did it make what they said 
or thought? But I am telling you about it, just as it was. 
I wanted, I needed desperately at that moment, the sense of 
my own dignity. It was all I had left. So I went out to 
that dinner party and defended it. 

Aunt Clo was nice. She was pleased with me and put 
me opposite her. It was a Vatican dinner, semi-political. I 
had, I remember, the Italian Ambassador on my right and 
the Foreign Minister on my left. Your aunt was between 

the Archbishop and the Due de B-recently arrived from 

Rome. The talk was brilliant, I believe. I heard it in a 
daze, but managed to keep my end up somehow. Clementine 
was there, at her best, in wonderful form. She must have 
known all about Philibert, for she came up to me after dinner 
and said—“Blaise de Joigny is my great friend. You must 
come to see me. We have much in common.” Our friend¬ 
ship dates front that night. 

But when I reached home I felt more tired than I had 
thought it possible to be. I went up to the nursery. Jinny 
was asleep in her cot, hugging a white woolly dog. I knelt 
beside her and sent out my spirit in search of God, but I 
did not find Him. I could not pray. I heard my baby’s 
breathing, blissful, trustful breathing. I knelt listening. 
She was so small and sweet. Above her was an immense 
blackness. She made now and then happy little sounds in 
her sleep, and lying there so still I saw her moving on and 
on, invisibly, into the future to the ticking of the nursery 
clock, carried along as she lay there on the current of life, 
life that was an enormous dupery, an ugliness and a lie. 

The days passed, separate and distinct, moving in a pro- 



190 Jane—Our Stranger 

cession, each one to be watched and endured separately, mov¬ 
ing by their own volition, taking no account of me, having 
nothing to do with me, answerable to some mysterious power 
that started each one rolling like a bead dropped from the 
end of a string, and in each one, as in a crystal, I saw the 
pageant of Paris revolving, but I was outside, drifting in 
empty space. 

The longing to get away from it all was unbearable. I 
would go—I would go—I must go—Patience Forbes was the 
only person in the world who could help me—and yet I went 
on working out my idea that took me about among people, 
and you, dear Blaise, went with me. Your attitude was of 
a delicacy rare even in your world of delicate adjustments 
and sympathies. You understood, you constituted yourself 
my escort. Do you remember those days, how we went 
from one place to another, luncheons, dinners, private views, 
official receptions, and how we tacitly agreed on just the 
amount we were bound to do for our purpose? I scarcely 
realized at the time all that it meant for you to do this, and 
how the family would resent your attitude. I know now 
that they never quite trusted you after this. As I remember 
we talked nothing over and did not, I think, mention Phili¬ 
bert save once, when I asked you if you knew where he was. 
You did know, of course. Every one knew, I suppose, 
except myself. They had been seen, those two, boarding 
the Simplon express. They were in Venice, you told me, 
I had wanted to know for convenience. Having adopted a 
line, it seemed best to follow it consistently. One was to 
assume that my husband had gone away for a holiday. I 
was there to make his excuses to suffering hostesses de¬ 
prived of his society. The note to be struck was light and 
commonplace, as if his absence were like any other of his 
many past absences. The pretence deceived no one, but 
then the consistent lying made for decency. I was marking 
time. It was particularly difficult because I was not acting 
in accord with my nature. Had I been natural at that time I 
should have been horrible; I should have smashed things. 


Jane—Our Stranger 19 i 

But I was not behaving like myself. I see now what it 
was; I was behaving like one of you, behaving as Claire, for 
instance, would have behaved in my place. I was adopting 
your methods and your standards. Not to give myself 
away, not to let any one suspect what I was feeling and 
thinking, not to make a false step, not to make above all a 
public fuss, that seems to have been my idea. To preserve 
appearances as beautifully as possible, that was what you 
and I were working at, as we trailed drearily round from 
one place to another saying suave things with smooth faces. 

And there was another influence working on me, even 
more subtle and far more pervasive. You will smile, per¬ 
haps, when I tell you that my quiet behaviour came from 
looking every day across the Place de la Concorde to the 
austere and reserved fagade of the Madeleine, or across a 
silver distance of pale houses to the far alabaster pinnacle of 
the Sacre Coeur high above the city, but it was so. Paris ex¬ 
ercises upon its inhabitants a fine discipline of taste. Those 
who love it change unconsciously. The long, wide, sym¬ 
metrical avenues, the formal gardens, with their slim foun¬ 
tains, single waving sprays of crystal water, the calm 
fagades of long rows of narrow, uniform houses, palest yel¬ 
low in sunlight, pearl white towards evening, these things 
have an effect upon one’s manners that is imperceptible and 
profound. They spelt to me harmony and restraint and 
Plato’s idea of beauty. My high falsity was at the best only 
less futile than a good, noisy bout of hysterics. What com¬ 
forted me in these hours of doubt was that I knew you were 
no more certain than I. You did not represent your 
family. You were neither a go-between nor a spy nor a 
jailor, you were a friend. Positively I believe there 
were moments when you wanted me to break out, break 
away, throw caution and carefulness to the winds. 
Sometimes there was so much compassion in your face that 
I almost cried out to you not to care so much. I wanted to 
warn you that it was only for the moment that I was keep¬ 
ing my head up, that I wouldn’t be able and didn’t intend 


192 Jane—Our Stranger 

to go on with it indefinitely and that the thought behind all 
my smooth social words was; “He has gone for ever. Soon 
I’ll be free to say so.” 

I did really believe Philibert had left me for good. It 
never occurred to me that he would ever come back, and that 
belief was in a way my refuge. I was rid of them both; 
Bianca, I told myself, would be satisfied now and would 
leave me alone. She would carry on her mischief else¬ 
where, not in my life. My life was, I believed, my own, 
separated for always from hers and from Philibert. 

Then one day Fan turned up. She came in jauntily, her 
head in the air, as if nothing had happened. She looked 
very smart, her hat set at a rakish angle, her short, pleated 
skirt flippant above her neat ankles. From across the room 
she called out “Well,—Jane, we’ve married a nice pair of 
men. Here’s Philibert’s skipped and I’ve had to send 
Ivanoff packing. He’d taken to beating me, I’m black and 
blue all over. Some people like it—I don’t.” She gave me 
a peck on the cheek. “Poor old Jane, you’re taking it hard, 
I suppose.” She turned back the sleeve of her dress. Her 
arm had welts on it. “You should see my back.” I shud¬ 
dered, but at sight of my emotion she twitched away from 
me with a nervous laugh. “Between my Slav and your 
Frenchman I don’t know that there’s much to choose. God, 
if it were only an occasional beating I shouldn’t mind.” 
She did a waltz step across the room, twirled round on her 
tiny feet, lit a cigarette standing on tiptoe, and collapsed 
into a chair in a spasm of coughing. 

“I had it out with Ivanoff, my dear, about you, and I 
know all about it—just the exact sums you gave him for me, 
bless your baby heart, and everything. At first I doubted 
you. I was a fool. I’m sorry. Unfortunately I found 
out other things. There are other women in the world 
who don’t love me at all, but who pay for my shoes. Do 
you'hear? Do you get what I mean? I find I’ve been pay¬ 
ing my bills with their money. What do you say to that? 
I ask you simply. And we’re on the streets now—at least 


Jane—Our Stranger 193 

he’s gone—I’m staying with Madeleine de Greux, and the 
bailiffs have got our furniture.” And she went off into a 
wild scream of laughter. It was incredibly painful. 
She sat there as neat and smart as a pin. Her small cocked 
hat on one side of her head, her pretty little legs crossed, one 
high-heeled patent leather slipper dangling in the air, the 
other tapping the floor, she puffed smoke through her little 
tilted nose and looked at me desperately out of her hard, 
level eyes, while she yelled with laughter just as if some one 
were tickling her till she screamed with pain. 

I went to my desk and got out my cheque book. “Let’s 
pay off the furniture first,” I said as prosaically as I could, 
but she jumped up irritably. 

“God! Jane, what a fool you are. Put that cheque book 
away. Do you think I’d touch another penny of yours? 
There—don’t be hurt. Of course I would if I needed it, 
but what good will money do ? I can’t go and hunt out Ivo’s 
mistresses and pay them back, can I ? Oh, God! Oh, God! 
Oh, God!—I did like him. Men are devils. Even now I’m 
worried about him. I imagine him locked up somewhere or 
dead drunk in the gutter lying out in the dark—whereas he’s 
probably at Monte having a high old time. By the way, 
your French family is in a great state about you. Claire 
says their position as regards you is very delicate. I sup¬ 
pose it is. They don’t know whether to come here or to 
leave you alone. They wonder what you’re going to do. 
They’re frightfully cut up about Fifi, and they’re afraid 
you’ll do something final like getting a divorce.” 

“Well, my dear, that’s just what I do think of doing.” 

“I see.” She ruminated, chewing her cigarette that had 
gone out. “They’ll never forgive you if you do.” 

“I suppose not, but I don’t see that that matters.” 

“Oh, but it does. They’re so perfectly charming. They’d 
make Paris impossible for you.” 

“That sounds charming, I must say.” 

“Don’t be stupid, Jane. You know what I mean. You 
know how clever they are. They’re the most attractive 


194 Jane—Our Stranger 

people on earth. But if you set them against you, the whole 
clan, you’ll find life here very different.” 

“I don’t propose to live here.” 

“Where then?” 

“In St. Mary’s Plains.” 

“Heaven help you, my poor misguided lamb.” 

“I’m homesick,” I persisted obstinately. 

“Of course, for the moment, because you’re unhappy.” 

“No, not only because I’m unhappy. I like the Grey 
House. I belong there. It’s quiet, it’s safe, it’s real, it’s 
the place I know best in the world.” 

“Nonsense. It’s a dingy little shanty.” 

“You can call it names if you like. I don’t care what 
you say. I’m going back there.” 

“For good?” 

“I don’t know—perhaps.” 

“Well, you won’t stay, so you’d better not risk it.” 

“Risk what?” 

“Having to eat humble pie and come back to be forgiven.” 

It was my turn to get up with a fling of exasperation and 
walk about. She followed me with her bright, piercing 
gaze. 

“Think a little, Jane. Use your brains, if you can. Think 
of the difference between your life here and your life at 
home in that Godforsaken hole of St. Mary’s Plains. Look 
at this room. Look out of the window and remember. 
Don’t I remember? Wooden sidewalks with weeds growing 
between the boards, boys playing marbles in the street, 
women hanging out their washing in backyards, Sunday 
clothes, oh, those best Sunday clothes, revival meetings, 
Moody and Sankey in tents on the lake shore, picnics, bi¬ 
cycle rides, dances at the Country Club, freckled youths 
kissing you on the verandah, great news—Ethel Barrymore 
is coming in her new play that’s been running a year in New 
York. Excursions on the lake, fifty cents a round trip and 
soft drinks, sarsaparilla, ginger ale, buggy rides, shopping 
down town, talking to old women—cats who gossip about 


Jane—Our Stranger 195 

somebody’s new red silk petticoat, too flighty, indecent. All 
going to church and shouting ‘Hallaleluja’ and eating blue¬ 
berry pie afterwards till their mouths are all black inside.” 

“Well,” I said. She wriggled about as if sitting on pins. 

“You want to give up Paris, this house, your position here, 
for that? You’ve got Europe at your feet. You’ve only 
got to sit tight and every one in Paris will be on your side. 
Fifi will come back and be as good as gold. You’ll be able 
to do what you like with him after this.” 

I stopped her. 

“So you think I’d take Philibert back?” 

“Yes, I do. We all do.” 

“And begin again living together, after this?” 

“Yep.” 

“You don’t find it appalling even to think of—?” 

“No, merely a little uncomfortable to begin with.” 

“You take my breath away.” 

She eyed me calmly. “My dear Jane, don’t be the high 
tragedian. All marriages are like that. How many women 
do we know, do you suppose, whose husbands haven’t had 
little vacations—?” 

“If you don’t mind we won’t talk about it. Other 
women’s marriages are nothing to me.” 

She shrugged her shoulders and lit another cigarette, 
and for a time we were silent. I looked at her. She 
seemed to me terrible, hard as nails and more cynical than 
any one, and yet she was my friend. Nothing, I knew then 
as I watched her, nothing that she could say or do would 
alter that fact. She belonged to me. What she felt would 
always affect me. In some absurd way I was responsible 
for her. Our childhood and its meagre austere background, 
with all that she repudiated, held us together. 

Presently she began again. “Now listen to me, Jane. 
Philibert may be a brute, but he’s done a lot for you. He 
has given you a very great position. You were rich but he 
knew how to make*your money tell. There’s not a house 
in the world like yours. I don’t mean only the furniture. 


196 Jane—Our Stranger 

Your parties are beyond everything. You’re more re - 
cherchee than any woman in Paris. You can pick and 
choose from all the great people of the world, the men with 
brains. Lord! how you could amuse yourself if you wanted 
to. I only wish I had your chance. Do you think I’d let 
my husband’s infidelity spoil my life? I’d be no such fool. 
I might not like it, but I’d make up my mind to forget it. 
Well, here you are and you want to go back and crawl into 
that little hole in a prairie and stifle there.” 

“Yes, I do.” 

“But the people there—” she almost screamed. 

“I don’t know about the people. They may not be what 
you call amusing, but they’re at any rate natural, common 
or garden human beings, and anyhow if there weren’t an¬ 
other soul there’s Aunt Patty; she’s the finest woman in the 
world, and I adore her.” 

Fan looked at me in amazement. 

“I’d die!” she gasped on a long, wailing breath. We were 
again silent, then, while the image of Aunt Patience took 
shape before us, gaunt, with her big bones showing under 
her limp, black clothes, worn, strong, knotted hands, crooked 
humourous face, weather-beaten like a peasant’s, straggling 
thin, grey hair. And suddenly I saw her as she appearea 
to Fan, a shabby old maid in frumpy clothes, talking with a 
nasal twang, saying things like Mark Twain, worshipping 
Huxley and Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln, a child 
woman of stern moral principles, unaware of the existence 
of such life as ours, displeased and angry at our doings, 
hurt deeply by our words and our laughter. I imagined her 
in Paris, stalking down the Rue de la Paix like 
a pilgrim from the Caucasus, a figure of grotesque grandeur 
disturbing the merry frivolous traffic, sublime, terrible 
spectre of stark simplicity, utterly out of her element in our 
world. And I was angry with Fan for evoking such an 
image. I turned away from it in distress, ashamed. 

“You’ve already gone too far,” she said impishly. “You 
can’t get back. You’re spoiled for your Aunt Patience.” 


Jane—Our Stranger 197 

“We’ll see,” I muttered. My suspicions were suddenly 
roused by a look in her little squirrel face. 

“ You’ve been talking to Claire,” I said. 

“Well, what if I have?” 

“She sent you.” 

“Yes, she did; but I was coming, anyway.” 

“I don’t believe you. You hate my being unhappy, you 
were worried, but you’d have avoided coming if you could. 
The fact that we’ve always been friends and that you can’t 
help it is a nuisance to you. Well, tell me, what is Claire’s 
point of view?” 

“She thinks in some measure that it’s your fault. She 
says Fifi has behaved very badly, but that if you’d been 
clever he wouldn’t have done anything sensational, any¬ 
thing to make a scandal.” 

“I see.” 

“She’s very unhappy about it all. She says it’s making 
her mother ill. She says that if it were not for her mother 
it would not matter so much, but that if you divorce Phili¬ 
bert it will kill her.” 

“Why doesn’t Claire come herself and tell me all this?” 

“She doesn’t dare. She says you don’t like her.” 

“That, my dear, is funny. I’ve adored her for years and 
she’s consistently snubbed me.” 

“Well, anyway, you’re so different, she feels you wouldn’t 
understand. You see, she puts up with a good deal herself.” 

“I know. Perhaps I understand more than she thinks I 
do.” 

“She’s very unhappy in her marriage, too, but she doesn’t 
make a fuss about it. She doesn’t expect the impossible.” 

“Whereas I do?” 

“Well, yes. Between you and me and the lamp-post I 
think you do.” 

“I only ask to be allowed to save Genevieve from a 
fate like my own.” 

“Oh, my dear, if you think they’ll let you have Gene¬ 
vieve—” 


198 Jane—Our Stranger 

“What do you mean?” 

“A man always has rights over his child in this country, 
whatever the facts against him.” 

“You suggest that the law wouldn’t give me my own 
child?” 

“It wouldn’t, not the French law.” 

“Well, we’ll see about that, too.” 

“Jane, you’re terrible.” 

“Am I?” 

“Yes, you frighten me.” 

“I’m sorry.” 

“What shall I say to them?” 

“To whom?” 

“Claire, Madame de Joigny, your Aunt Clothilde, all of 
them.” 

“Say nothing. Why should you serve them? Why 
should you side with them against me? Weren’t you mine 
years before you ever saw one of them? What’s become of 
our friendship? What’s become of your loyalty? You’ve 
sold yourself, you’re not what you used to be, you’d do any¬ 
thing now for a pleasant life. Because they’re attractive 
and have attractive manners and make pretty speeches you’d 
do anything for them. What good does it all do you? 
You’re ill, you’re worn to a frazzle, your husband has been 
dragging you down, down, into a darkness, queer, unimag¬ 
inable, shameful, and you can’t get loose. You just dance 
about in the blackness. Your feet stick in the mud. Hav¬ 
ing a good time somehow, anything for a good time. 
Coughing yourself to pieces, raging fever on you, your heart 
sick with distrust, restless, evasive, evading issues, you go 
on dancing, laughing, having a good time. Why don’t you 
pull yourself together? Why won’t you let me help you? 
I love you. I love you much better than Claire does. If 
your husband were put in prison what would Claire do, do 
you think?” 

But Fan had grown deadly pale. I stopped, horrified. 


Jane—Our Stranger 199 

She was leaning against the mantelpiece, spitting into her 
handkerchief: there was blood on it. 

That evening when I had taken her back to Madeleine 
de Greux’s—for she refused to stay with me—and we had 
put her to bed, she clung to me weakly. Her eyes closed. 
“It’s all true, what you said, Jane,” she gasped, “but I can’t 
help it, I can’t stop. If I stopped amusing myself I’d die.” 

“But, my darling, let me get you well first, let me take you 
somewhere.” 

“Perhaps, later,” she whispered, “if you don’t go to 
America. Perhaps we might try Switzerland, but not where 
there are sick people.” She shuddered. “I hate sickness 
so, and unhappiness. It’s so ugly. Being gay is beautiful. 
It makes things look beautiful. Ivanoff is a devil, but you’ll 
admit he was beautiful. I like attractive brutes better than 
clumsy saints. So do you, that’s why you married Phili¬ 
bert, just because he was so attractive. No one could be so 
attractive when he tried. Admit it, he gave you wonderful 
hours, you know he did. Wasn’t that something? What’s 
the use of being good if you’re deadly dull? Good men 
aren’t our kind, my dear. They’d bore us to death. Phili¬ 
bert made you happy for a time, wonderfully, because he 
knew how. What more do you want? Don’t be a fool. 
Take it all as it comes. Make an arrangement with him— 
you owe him something. I’ll be all right in a day or so. 
Let me know what you decide. Americans are hipped on 
their ideals. All that’s no use. French people know what’s 
what. Claire would love you if you gave her a chance. 
They are all ready to be fond of you, and they’re delicious 
people. Don’t be a fool. There, leave me now. We were 
idiots to quarrel. You have a nasty temper, my poor Jane, 
and your heart’s too big for this world. You’ll come an 
awful cropper if you’re not careful.” 


Ill 


P HILIBERT’S family had shown up to this point, a 
remarkable restraint. As long as I went about as if 
nothing had happened, they left me alone, but after 
my scene with Fan I allowed myself a revulsion of feeling. 
I stopped going out. I shut myself up and sent for my 
lawyer. Philibert had been gone two months. I saw no 
reason to put off any longer, the action that I was deter¬ 
mined on; I would start divorce proceedings, leave things in 
professional hands and go home. What else could I do? 

July was drawing to a close. The season was ending in a 
languid dribble of belated garden parties. Fan, with a 
characteristic spurt of energy, had recovered and gone off 
to the Austrian Tyrol with the de Greux, leaving me with a 
last bit of reiterated advice about not being a fool. I ob¬ 
served that I had no place to go, and nothing to do. 
Biarritz, Trouville, Dinard, would mean carrying on the 
sickening pretence under an even closer scrutiny than in 
Paris. The Chateau de Ste. Clothilde had no charms for 
me now. I had liked the place, but Philibert had spoiled 
it with his endless improvements. It was now, his creation 
stamped with him. Sitting alone in my room at the top of 
the house with the shabby relics of the Grey House, 1 
thought of him as he had been there in the country, strutting 
about directing his army of workmen, cutting down trees, 
pulling up whole lawns to replace them with gravelled ter¬ 
races, and sinking into the reluctant earth marble basins for 
the lovely vagrant waters of the park. He had always pro¬ 
fessed to be the enemy of nature. It was true. What he 
called —“Les betises de la nature /' filled him with disgust. 
Spreading trees and green fields dotted with buttercups and 
bubbling streams tumbling through thickets got on his 

200 


201 


Jane—Our Stranger 

nerves. “Regardez done le laissez-aller de tout cela” he 
would cry. “How ugly it is. How stupid. It has no form, 
no design.” Clumps of trees in a meadow he would liken 
to pimples on hairy faces. He called grass the hair of the 
earth, and couldn’t endure it unless it was close cut. He 
never saw a stream of water without wanting to use it up 
in elaborate fountains. Gardens he regarded as “salons” 
in the open air. One should use the shrubs and trees and 
flowers as one used silks and brocades in an interior. Every¬ 
thing in a garden must be “voulu” Nothing must be left 
to go its own way, not a vine, not a rosebush, not a tree 
should be allowed a movement of its own. Nature must be 
bound and twisted into a work of art. “Ah,” he would ex¬ 
claim, “how it amuses me to torture nature.” You know 
what he did. The result was very fine of its kind, certainly 
very grandiose. He would lead people out on the terrace 
and, standing a minute, a shiny dapper little manikin, five 
foot four in high heels above that great design of gravel 
walks and fountains and squares of water, with their little 
parquets of green grass closed in by hedges, like a series of 
drawing-rooms, he would sparkle with enthusiasm. “You 
see,” he would say, “what I have done, you see how these 
gardens s’accrochent au chateau, how it is all a part of the 
house. The chateau could not exist without the garden, nor 
the garden without the chateau. One would have no sense 
without the other. Before I restored the grounds and elab¬ 
orated on the old designs of Lenotre, the house was hor¬ 
rible.” He had placed complicated machinery under his 
fountains that made the waters when they were in play take 
a dozen varied successive shapes. Nothing amused him 
more than watching all those waters playing, twisting, turn¬ 
ing, tracing strange designs in the sunlight, designs that he 
himself had imagined. It gave him a peculiar joy to see his 
own idea produced in crystal drops of water. He had 
worked in sunlight and limpid flowing water as a painter 
works in colours, and had in a way produced for himself 
the illusion of the miraculous. 


202 


Jane—Our Stranger 

He couldn't understand why I suffered when he had all 
those magnificent trees uprooted and when later on I com¬ 
plained that there was no shade anywhere and no place to 
lie down with a book: “But, my poor child, you’ve your 
bed for that, or your ‘chaise longue This garden is neither 
a bedroom nor a boudoir, it is a ‘salle de fetes’ ” 

I remembered all this. Certainly for many reasons Ste. 
Clothilde was out of the question. I would take Jinny home 
with me to St. Mary’s Plains. The moment had come. A 
strange excitement came over me as I at last wrote out the 
cablegram to Patience Forbes announcing our sailing on the 
first of August. On the same day I had a talk with my 
solicitor. Maitre Baudoin was a jaded, dry man, I believe 
honest, and rather dull. He was eager for a holiday and 
very bored, I could see, at the idea of being kept in town. 
He gave me little sympathy. 

I wished to divorce my husband. That might or might 
not be possible. It depended, of course, to a certain ex¬ 
tent, to a limited extent, on whether I had sufficient grounds, 
and whether Monsieur le Marquis contested the suit. I 
intimated briefly that I believed I had sufficient grounds. 
He eyed me gravely through half-shut deferential and sleepy 
eyes. Did I think my husband would defend the suit, be¬ 
cause if he did, no matter what my grounds were, the case 
might last five years. He told me this as a matter of con¬ 
science. Such a case would be lucrative to him, of course, 
but it might prove fatiguing to the parties more directly con¬ 
cerned. Five years? Yes, or even ten. That was the 
way in France. A divorce against a man who fought it 
was very difficult to obtain, and of course the Church did 
not recognize it. That was not his affair save in so far as 
if I had the intention of re-marrying, such a marriage would 
of necessity be considered bigamous by all good Catholics. 
I had, I said, no intention of marrying a second time. He 
seemed at that rather mystified. I desired, then, nothing 
more than legal separation? That was much simpler. It 
was all a question of property. Was there a settlement? 


Jane—Our Stranger 203 

He supposed I wished “separation des biens” I told him 
that I had no wish to leave M\onsieur de Joigny in financial 
difficulties and that that question might be left until later, 
but he proved obstinate and kept on talking on the same sub¬ 
ject till my head ached. Finally I gathered that he was sug¬ 
gesting as delicately as he could that Philibert might be 
bribed. “But I can’t settle on him a large sum,” I objected 
wearily, “the fortune is tied up for my daughter.” 

“Ah, a trust?” 

“Yes.” 

“It all goes to your child on your death?” 

“Yes, to my children or child, by my father’s will.” 

“I see. She becomes, then, the important factor.” 

“What do you mean?” 

“You would lose her.” 

“Why?” 

“The law courts would not deprive her father of her 
custody.” 

“But if he doesn’t care for her?” 

“Are you sure he doesn’t?” 

“He has left her.” 

“For a time, perhaps, but she is his, and if, which would 
be most unnatural, he did not care for her, he might still 
care for what she represented.” 

It was on the tip of my tongue to say that he cared for 
nothing but his mistress, but I left the vulgar words un¬ 
spoken. After all, I was not sure that Philibert did not 
care for Genevieve. His moods of a doting father might 
be genuine. He might indeed fight for her. My will 
hardened as I wearily dismissed the tiresome discouraging 
man of law. It was all more complicated than I had 
thought. 

He had scarcely got out of the house before it was in¬ 
vaded by relatives. With a startling promptitude, they bore 
down on me. They must have had spies in the house. My 
secretary must have telephoned the alarm, or the Governess 
or the Butler, any one, or all of the staff may have been 


204 Jane—Our Stranger 

keeping them informed. In any case, there they were, 
miraculously ushered into my presence without warning 
one by one, or two by two, or in groups, aunts, uncles, 
cousins, first, second, third cousins, cousins by marriage 
once removed, some of them people whom I scarcely knew, 
strange old women in wigs with withered faces and ragged 
feather boas, unearthed for the occasion out of their old 
grand sealed houses; shrivelled old men with stiff knees 
and watery eyes; it would have seemed funny, had my 
nerves not been on edge, had their visits not appeared to 
me so exceedingly misplaced. I soon found that no hinting 
on my part would make them take this view. They meant 
business. They were the family. They were acting for 
the family and as a family. Some of them constituted that 
sacred thing the “conseil de famille” and they were 
acting in accordance with the rights and duties of a French 
family in harmony with and under the protection of the 
law of the French state. With correct and concise polite¬ 
ness they gave me to understand that I was not free to 
do as I liked, that I was one of them, bound as they were 
bound, and that if I chose to go against their will, and defy 
my obligations, then I would do so at my own peril and at 
the cost of what I held most dear. I saw what they were 
driving at. They meant to keep Jinny whatever happened. 
If I declared war, I would lose my child. 

I put it brutally. They didn’t. They were charming. 
They beat round the bush. They asked after my health. 
They drank tea and smoked cigarettes and patted Jinny’s 
head and said charming things to her and gave her 
bonbons but they made their meaning clear and the more 
diplomatic they were, the angrier I became. 

This kind of thing went on for three days. I remained 
obdurate. I refused to commit myself, but gradually I 
was becoming frightened. What frightened me was that 
I saw that they all, every one of them, even those that I 
had thought most human, even your Aunt Alice who was 
a saint and your Uncle Stanislas all sided with Philibert, 


Jane— Our Stranger 205 

all stood solid behind him, all would stick to him no matter 
what he did, before the world and against the foreigner 
who threatened the close fabric of their community; and 
I took it as a sinister portent that those of the immediate 
family, whom I knew best, your mother and Claire and 
Aunt Clothilde, stayed away. In despair I went to Aunt 
Clothilde. What, I asked her, did it all mean? She gave 
me no comfort. It meant simply that things were so in 
France. French families were like that. They clung to¬ 
gether, and they did not admit divorce. If I tried to 
divorce Philibert I would fail and would in the attempt lose 
my child. Philibert, of course, was a rascal, but what 
would you, I ought to have known it from the beginning. 
American women thought too much of themselves. There 
was no modesty in the way I was behaving. Why should I 
suppose that the whole scheme of the social state should be 
upset because my husband liked another woman better than 
he did me? She liked me, of course she liked me—for that 
reason she had refused to take part in the family’s councils 
of war. But she was disappointed in me, she had thought I 
had pluck. Here I was, behaving like a fish wife who has 
been knocked into the gutter, screaming for my rights, for 
vengeance. I had better go home and say my prayers. I 
went, and as if in answer to the dreadful old woman’s bid¬ 
ding found a bishop in the drawing-room. My nerves by 
that time were in such a state that the suave and polished 
prelate soon had me in tears. He mistook them for tears 
of repentance. He talked a long time about the consolation 
of religion and the comfort of confession and rejoiced to 
find that I was less inimical to the benign influence of Rome, 
than he had thought. I scarcely heard what he said, but 
his fine ivory face and glowing eyes and thin set mouth, 
gave me a feeling of uncanny power. I remembered that I 
belonged to his Church, that I had been solemnly married at 
the High Altar of Rome, that there I had taken vows, 
had professed beliefs, and I felt a sudden suerstitious terror. 


206 Jane—Our Stranger 

What if it were true, their truth? What could they do to 
me, these mysterious ministers of the Pope? What could 
they not do? In my fever, I saw myself tracked to St. 
Mary’s Plains, followed up the steps of the Grey House 
by sallow figures in black cassocks, and suffering, labouring 
for the rest of my days, under the mysterious blight of an 
ecclesiastical curse. 

When one lives in a country that is not one’s own, among 
strange people whom one knows only superficially, sur¬ 
rounded by customs and conventions that one does not 
understand, one finds it difficult to decide moral issues. I 
felt bewildered and at a loss. It still seemed to me at 
moments inevitable and right to divorce Philibert. At other 
moments I felt less sure. The disapproval of the organ¬ 
ized compact community was having its effect. The 
antagonism of the family acted on me with incessant pres¬ 
sure, however obstinately I repeated to myself the words 
“I don’t care.” I did care. I was alone. I could not 
even be certain that my Aunt Patience would approve. She 
might say in her terse way, “Quite right, Jane. He’s for¬ 
feited your respect, get rid of him,” or she might say, “You 
married him before God, you can’t undo that,” I did not 
know what she would say. And the problem of Genevieve 
tortured me. The fear of losing her if I divorced her 
father was no greater than the fear of seeing her gradually 
slipping from me as the years passed, if I remained his 
wife. No one knew better than I how charming he could 
be if he chose. I watched him in anticipation stealing her 
heart from me, turning her against her own mother. I 
saw her becoming more and more like him, becoming his 
pupil, his work of art. Philibert made things his own so 
easily. He had a genius for conquest. Everything that 
he touched became his. How different from me! There 
was nothing in Philibert’s house that belonged to me, except 
the few sticks of furniture that I had hidden away in that 
room upstairs. The lovely things in the great rooms 
troubled me. They affected my nerves as if a chorus of 


Jane—Our Stranger 207 

small muffled voices were calling out to me in strange 
tongues that I could not understand. I realized their beauty, 
but was conscious of not appreciating them as they deserved, 
There was no sympathy between us. They affected me but 
I did not affect them. I could never make them look as 
if they were a part of my life. I was loath to handle them, 
but no amount of touching with my fingers would have 
given them a familiar look; the tables and chairs and tapes¬ 
tries remained there around me, enigmatic, permanent, un¬ 
responsive. My life spent itself, throbbing out among them, 
beating against their calm, smooth surfaces without reach¬ 
ing them. There was no trace in that house of the tumult 
of my own life. It continued cold, inexorable and strange. 

It remained for your mother to seek me out in my lone¬ 
liness and show me what I should do. I thought at the time 
that I recognized her words as words of truth. I do not 
know now whether I was right or wrong. 

Claire never came. She sent her husband instead, not so 
much as a messenger, more as an object lesson, a mute 
reminder—I caught her idea—I was to look at him and 
realize what she was putting up with and draw from the 
spectacle of his awfulness the moral. Unexpectedly, his 
awfulness, appealed to me. There was something about this 
keen little stolid French bounder that was a relief. His 
oily head, his fat brown face, his monstrous nose and little 
bright beady eyes, these unattractive things made up a hard 
compact entity. He was solid and complete, round paunch, 
tight trousers, plump hands fingering a gold watch chain, 
smell of bayrum and soap, aura of success, of materialism, 
of industrial jubilance and all the rest of it. But he showed 
me for the first time that day something more, himself smart¬ 
ing under his thick skin with the innumerable de Joigny 
slights stinging him, controlled enough not to let on, deter¬ 
mined to get out of them in exchange what they could give 
him, but not counting it much, a shrewd downright kind little 
rascal, with a good old middle-class self-respect strong in 
him, strong enough to make him feel himself their superior. 


208 Jane—Our Stranger 

It didn’t take him long to make his point. He talked 
quickly and neatly. 

Claire was unwell, she had sent him to add his voice to 
the family howl. Claire never howled. When there was 
trouble, she withdrew. It wasn’t her genre, to mix her¬ 
self up in a fuss. Well—he wasn’t at all sure that he had 
anything to say. Firstly beacause, after all, it was none of 
his business. He wasn’t a member of the de Joigny family 
and never would be. They had made that perfectly clear, 
years ago. So why should he interfere? 

I smiled. “Why indeed?” He smiled back, his hands 
crossed on his stomach; his smile took a cynically humorous 
curve. 

“If on the other hand, Madame, my sister-in-law, you 
want an outsider’s opinion, it is at your disposal.” 

“Two outsiders, confabing together,” I ventured. 

“No,” He spoke abruptly, in a light sharp staccato, a 
nasal voice, not unpleasant, the voice of the phenomenally 
intelligent French bourgeoisie. “You are not as I am. 
You are a woman. They won’t let you in—but they won’t 
let you out. You belong to them. I don’t—beside I am 
of their people. I am French—I have my own backing. 
They don’t like what I represent but they are obliged to 
admit its importance. It is the backbone of France that I 
represent, the bread they eat, the stones they walk on, the 
nation they ground under their heels in the old days. They 
stamp on me now, but only in play, only to save their faces 
—not seriously—they can’t. You, Madame, are different. 
You are a foreigner, and 'sans defense! La famille de 
Joigny have a contempt for foreigners. Your protectors 
are in America. They snap their fingers at them. You 
are helpless—” 

It was true. Well then? 

He eyed me, humorously. “It depends on what you want 
out of them. I take it they can’t give you much of any¬ 
thing. You didn’t marry one of them, as I did, to ameliorate 


Jane—Our Stranger 209 

your situation in society. Putting aside the charm of the 
son and daughter, why did we do it? I did it as a bit of 
business. For me it was ‘une: affaire—’ how it turned out 
is neither here nor there. I can look after myself. For 
you it is different, I repeat you are helpless. They are too 
many for you.” He chuckled good-naturedly. 

Again it was true; I assented meekly. 

“Ah ha— Voila, you see it. Then, my advice is—' Files’ 
—get out.” 

“And Genevieve?” 

“Bribe them.” 

“You think—?” 

He ruminated, his nose in the air—“Yes, I think—if you 
make it enough.” He laughed again, rose briskly, took up 
his hat, his cream-coloured gloves, his gold-headed cane. 
For an instant his bright little eyes scrutinized me—he 
seemed about to speak, his thick lips formed, I saw them 
there, grave words, a confidence perhaps, a lament, a plea 
for sympathy, I know not what. He didn’t speak them; 
he was very intelligent; he had a delicacy as fine as theirs, 
when he cared to show it. There was a nicer compliment 
to me in this clever little bounder’s attempting no under¬ 
standing with me, than any I had received in many a long 
day. 

He left with me a pleasant feeling of my own independ¬ 
ence, he left me invigorated and more sane than I had been, 
but your mother wiped out the impression he had made, with 
one wave of her hand. 

I remember the sight of her in my doorway. I was so 
little expecting her that I had a chance to see her quite 
clearly during one instant, before I realized who she was. 
A small black figure in a stiff little ugly black hat and short 
cape, a dumpy forlorn little figure of no grace or elegance, 
and a worn nervous face, out of which stared a pair of very 
bright determined dark eyes. She might have been a very 
hard-driven gentle woman, determined to brave insults and 


210 


Jane—Our Stranger 

apply for the post of housekeeper. This in the flash be¬ 
fore all that I knew of her covered her like a veil, and be¬ 
fore she spoke. 

I did not want to see her. I knew in an instant why she 
had come. I remember wondering if I could get out of the 
other door before she spoke, before I really looked at her, 
and all the time I was looking and she was looking, we were 
staring at each other. 

I had always had a deep regard for her. The fact that 
she did not like me, made no difference. That was where 
Claire’s husband had fallen short in his putting of the case. 
He didn’t know that I cared for Madame de Joigny; he 
didn’t know that I wanted the family to love me, because I 
loved them. Now in your mother’s presence, I felt the 
immense disadvantage of this. She cared nothing for me 
and I was bound to give in to her. I knew I would give in. 
I knew that I was about to make one last attempt to win 
her. I tried to rouse myself. I recalled and went over in 
my mind the opinion I knew she had of me. I knew that 
physically I was repulsive to her. Often when I approached 
her, I had seen her shudder. She thought me outree. Once 
she had said, “Why is it Jane, that you can never look like 
other people? Everything you put on becomes gorgeous 
and exaggerated. It is most unfortunate.” And she was 
afraid of my feelings, my violent enthusiasms and my deep 
longings. Oh, I knew, I knew quite well. Instinctively 
she felt my hot blood pounding in my veins—and recoiled 
from contact. 

Most of all she hated me because of what I had done to 
Philibert. I had made him nouveau riche; I had made 
him ridiculous; I had made him unhappy, and worst of all, 
I had made him appear to her, cruel and vulgar. When he 
was unkind to me, she hated me for being the cause of his 
unkindness. You thought her love for Philibert a blind 
adoration but it was not blind. She understood him, she 
knew him to his bones, and she spent her life in shielding 
him from her own scrutiny. Her relief was in submitting 


21 I 


Jane—Our Stranger 

herself to his charm. She delighted in him, but she hated 
his conduct. It seemed to her that he was a victim of what 
she most hated. She accused him in her own heart of being 
faithless to her faith, the faith of his ancestors. She saw 
on him the stains and distorting marks of the vulgar world 
that amused him, but she was continually falling in love 
with him and losing herself in his charm, seeking solace, 
suffering, being disappointed. I believe Philibert made 
your mother suffer more than he made me suffer, far, far 
more, for you see she couldn’t stop loving him, she could 
never be free from him. He was her own, her first-born, 
the child of her passionate youth. He was her self that 
she had projected beyond herself, he was her great adven¬ 
ture, he was the gauge she had thrown down at the feet of 
fate, and it took all her courage to face calmly the travesty 
he made of her miracle. 

My existence, you see, added immeasureably to the 
difficulty of her task. If he had married Bianca, Bianca, 
she believed, would have kept him in order and would have 
presented him to her soothed eyes in the light of a gallant 
gentleman. In marrying me he committed a serious error 
in taste to begin with, and having married me he behaved 
to me like a brute, and this was almost more than she could 
bear. The interesting thing to notice was that though she 
suffered horribly she made no attempt to remedy matters, 
did not try, I mean, to help us, and never gave me even as 
much as a hint as to how I should wisely have treated him, 
but limited her energy to just bearing her mortification with¬ 
out giving a sign of it. It did not seem to her worth while 
interfering to try and put things right when they were bound 
to go wrong, but it did seem necessary to keep up the 
make-believe that they were not going wrong. Almost 
everything in the world was going wrong. One couldn’t 
face it. One must shut oneself up. One must ignore ugly 
facts. 

Philibert’s going off with Bianca in that spectacular 
fashion did, I know, very deeply hurt your mother. The 


212 


Jane—Our Stranger 

horror of it to her must have been unspeakable. Here, at 
last, was an ugly fact of monstrous proportions that she 
could not ignore. She was bound at last to do something. 
She saw her son disgraced, her name dragged through the 
divorce court, she heard her world echoing with the clang¬ 
ing noise of scandal. She felt around her the brutal heav¬ 
ing of the foundation of her life. In her little tufted silken 
drawing-room that reminded me always of the inside of a 
jewel case, she had sat listening, shivering with apprehension. 
News came to her of the runaways. They were in Bianca’s 
palace in Venice giving themselves up to curious orgies of 
pleasure. People told strange tales of their doings. They 
seemed to have gone mad. News came then from another 
quarter. I had consulted my solicitor. Claire was thor¬ 
oughly frightened. Your mother did not hesitate then. 
She was old, she was tired, she was without hope or illusions. 
She saw her son as he was, and she saw Bianca at last as 
she was, and she believed that for her there was no happiness 
to be derived ever again from those two people. But she 
loved Philibert, she loved him with anger and contempt and 
a breaking heart, and she was determined to save him the 
last final ignominy, and so she put on her bonnet and came 
to me. And as I thought of these things I was drawn out 
of my chair toward her in spite of myself. 

I begged her to be seated. I told her that I was touched 
and distressed by her coming to me, and that had she sent 
me word I would have gone to her. She smiled wanly with 
her old infinite sweetness. That smile was the most con¬ 
summate bit of artistry I have ever beheld. It denied every¬ 
thing. It assumed everything. It fixed the pitch of our 
talk, it indicated a direction and a limit. It outlined before 
me the space in which I was to be allowed to move. It gave 
her the leading role in the little drama that was about to be 
played out between us, and it established her position once 
and for all as that of a great lady calling upon an awkward 
young woman. But I saw beyond her smile. I saw what 
she had been through, and was suffering. The combined 


Jane—Our Stranger 213 

play of her terrible reddened eyes and that lovely unreal 
smile impressed me profoundly. 

For any other woman the beginning of such a conversation 
would have been difficult, but your mother, opened up the 
subject that lay before us with ease and delicacy. Her 
phrase was finely pointed. She used it as she might have 
used a silver knife to lift the edge of a box that contained 
something ugly. 

“I do not know,” she said, “whether or not you have 
ever loved my son, but I have felt that his sudden departure 
must have seemed to you very shocking, so I have come to 
reassure you.” 

I recoiled at this. It seemed to me that I was being at¬ 
tacked and that was the last thing I expected. I was startled 
and puzzled by those opening words. What difference did 
it make whether or not I had loved her son? For a moment 
I felt angry. After all it was he that had left me; why then, 
should I be accused? As for reassurance, I did not want 
any. This was no time for reassurance. An ugly spirit 
stirred in me. I was about to answer abruptly, when I saw 
that the purple-veined hand that lay across the table before 
me was trembling. It was animated by some painful agita¬ 
tion that shook it even resting as it did on that strong sur¬ 
face. The withered palm was rubbing and quivering 
against the polished wood, the worn finger tips were tapping 
spasmodically. My eyes smarted at the sight of it. I spoke 
gently. 

“Yes, belle-maman, I thank you for coming.” 

“Ah, my poor child—and the family—I hear the family 
has been at you.” 

“They have been here.” 

“You must not mind them. They do not understand. In 
our world women, you know, take things differently, they 
do not expect what you expect.” 

There was a pause. What could I say? She seemed 
very reasonable and very kind. I had never felt her so 
near to me before. 


214 Jane—Our Stranger 

When she spoke again it was even more simply. “I have 
had no news of Philibert/’ she said sadly. “Have you?” 
The tone of her voice was intimate and more natural than I 
had ever heard it when addressed to me. It implied that 
we were both unfortunate together. I responded to it with 
a flicker of hope. 

“No,” I replied, “I have no news, but I have reason to 
believe that he will not come back.” 

“Ah,” she cried. “What makes you think that? But it 
is impossible.” 

“No,” I continued, “it is not impossible. It is true. He 
gave me to understand that himself.” 

I felt her watching me closely. 

“You mean?” she breathed. 

“I mean that I must now take measures to live my own 
life. It is impossible for me to live in his house any longer.” 

It was then that she made one of her quick, characteristic 
mental turns. 

“Yes,” she said. “It’s a monstrous house. I don’t won¬ 
der you detest it.” 

I almost smiled, but I was determined to get to the point. 
“Dear Belle-Mere ” I insisted, “that is neither here nor 
there. What I mean is that I must be legally free from 
Philibert.” I hesitated, I saw her face whiten, but I pressed 
the point. “It is best for me to tell you that I have decided 
to divorce your son.” 

I don’t know what effect I had expected and feared to 
produce. It may be that I thought she would break down 
or faint dead away, or something of that kind. She had 
seemed so frail that I had been really afraid of the' effect of 
my words. But nothing of this sort happened. The blow 
I had dealt seemed to spend its force in the air. It glanced 
off and went shivering into the rich, cold atmosphere of the 
room. 

“My dear,” she said, enunciating her words very pre¬ 
cisely, “on ne divorce pas dans notre monde.” And she 
looked away from me, coolly taking in the room with its 


Jane—Our Stranger 215 

priceless objects as if summoning them to witness to the 
truth of her statement. She was right to look round that 
room. It was her room, not mine. It understood her, not 
me. She had called it a moment before a detestable house, 
but that made no difference. Its magnificence was to be 
made use of all the same. We were in the room that Phili¬ 
bert always referred to when he took people over the house 
as “le salon de Madame de Joigny,” or “le boudoir de ma 
femme” It was the nicest room in the house. You re¬ 
member it well, with its pearly grey boiseries fine as lace, its 
Frangonard panels, its green lacquer furniture, the three 
windows on the garden where a stone fountain lifted its fine 
sculptured figures from the lawn. The light in the room 
was silvery green and translucent as the light seen beneath 
the surface of clear water, and in that dim radiance the fine 
precious objects floated above the polished floor as if even 
the laws of gravitation had been circumvented in the fine 
enclosed space. The boiseries had been in the Trianon— 
you remember Philibert had procured them after much bar¬ 
gaining. They had been designed and executed for Madame 
de Montespan. Their perfect beauty constituted a docu¬ 
ment, a testimony to the marvellous taste and finished crafts¬ 
manship of an epoch. France, in all its delicate dignity, ex¬ 
isted in that room. It is no wonder that your mother looked 
about her for moral support. The rest of the immense 
house might have belied her, here she could place her faith 
without hesitation. I opposed to it the profession of my 
own faith. 

“In my country,” I said dully, for I was beginning to 
feel baffled and confused, “we are not afraid to admit errors, 
to put away the past and begin something new.” 

“But this, my dear child, is your country,” she said more 
gently. “You are a Frenchwoman now.” 

I smiled. “Do you really think so?” I asked her. She 
drew a sharp breath. “Ah, if you only were,” she cried 
softly, “you would know how impossible it is to do what 
you want to do, and how useless.” 


216 Jane—Our Stranger 

My attention closed sullenly like a clamp on the words 
“impossible,” “useless.” I stared at the floor. Why im¬ 
possible? Why useless? Why did I listen to this woman 
who did not love me, and who told me that my longing to 
live was useless ? How was it she made me listen to her ? 
Where was her advantage? She was certain and I was un¬ 
certain, that was it. I was not quite sure, but she was sure. 
Her definite idea was projected out at me and into me like 
a hook. It took hold of me. I felt myself wriggling on it, 
and I heard, through the confusion of my own ideas that 
seemed to buzz audibly in my head, your mother’s voice 
talking. 

“You are young,” it said. “You come of a young people. 
You believe in miracles. You seek perfection on earth. 
Believe me, I am old and wise, ideals are all very well, but 
one must be practical about life. Philibert has behaved very 
badly. He has made a scandal, but you can remedy that and 
maintain your dignity by disregarding his escapade, or at 
any rate treating it as nothing more than an escapade. And 
such it is, nothing more, believe me. The acts of men are 
never anything more. Mon Dieu, if we took what they did 
seriously, where should we be, we women? We must take 
them for what they are. II le faut bien. We must never 
count on them. We must count on ourselves.” 

But I seemed gradually to lose track of her words. It 
was strange, but the sound of her voice was conveying a 
meaning more profound and more direct than her spoken 
phrases. The sound of her voice rang in my ears like a 
light, mournful, warning bell, high metallic, hollow and 
sweet. It was old, an old sound much older than the lips 
through which it issued. It seemed to come from a far 
distance, from the distant past. Hollow and sweet and 
measured, its monotony insisted on the fine tried truths of 
the past, it called up proud, faded images of old resignations 
and compromises and lost illusions, and sounded constantly 
the note of the persistent obstinacy of pride. The words 
“we women” reached me. I was a woman, she was a 


Jane—Our Stranger 217 

woman. We were together. There were men in the world 
and women. When one reduced things to their last sim¬ 
plicity all women were bound together in the same bundle, 
dealing with the same problem. She, the older woman, was 
wise, I was foolish; but we were sisters in disappointment, 
we were weak, we must be proud. We had both loved Phili¬ 
bert, but even I had never loved him as she loved him. And 
he had broken her heart. The dignity of our life depended 
on our pride, to hide our hurt, to make no sound, no com¬ 
plaint, to arrange silently to make things bearable, to influ¬ 
ence men without their knowing it. Our advantage lay in 
our clairvoyance. We could see through them when they 
could not see into us beyond our skins. We were weak if 
we treated them as they treated us, but we were strong if 
we remained mysterious, mute, proud. The children were 
ours. Everything we did was for our children. Philibert 
was her child. She must remember, she could not forget, 
he was her son. If we destroyed the family we destroyed 
our children. Even when the men destroyed it we must hold 
it together. We must pretend, for our children. When the 
man was gone we must pretend he was still there. Truth 
and beauty and dignity lay behind the pretence. We must 
pretend obstinately. If we pretended well enough it be¬ 
came true. We must not endanger our children’s lives, 
anything but that. 

Little Genevieve came dancing into my vision, her hair 
flying, her little skirts blowing, her toes dancing; a shadow 
fell on her, she stopped her gay jumping about. She was 
all at once pale. Her eyes gazed at me reproachfully, 
mournful eyes of a child, suffering. Something about her 
was wrong, twisted, maimed. I shuddered. Your mother’s 
voice was still going on. The words she spoke were con¬ 
cise, delicate little pieces of sound strung together close like 
beads, they made a long, pale, shining chain that reached 
from the beginning of time out into the future. Over and 
over again I heard the same words. It seemed to me that 
she was endlessly repeating the same thing as if it were a 


218 Jane—Our Stranger 

bit of magic, of hoodoo. I wondered if she were hypnotiz¬ 
ing me. Women must pretend—women, the protectors— 
the strong foundation—the family the basis of life. Women 
must keep the family intact. If we destroyed the family 
we destroyed our children—Philibert her child—Genevieve 
my child. 

I looked up and saw your mother as I had never seen her 
before—she was bare—she was stark naked—she was fight¬ 
ing for her child, for her son, for what he was to her, for 
him as he must and should be to her and to the world, for 
his safety, and his dignity. There was nothing between us. 
We were together, two women. She was appealing to me as 
a woman like herself. Philibert was her child. Even if she 
were deceiving me, pretending to care for me, what did it 
matter? I understood her—she was there in the great sim¬ 
plicity of her pretence assuming me to be like herself, proud, 
gentle, sure, a woman like herself. Vulgar! I was vul¬ 
gar; my struggling for freedom was coarse; I was making 
an ugly disgusting fuss; I was ashamed. 

A sensation of warmth and delight crept over me—and I 
knew that I had decided to do what she wanted. It seemed 
to me that she became my own then, and that I belonged to 
her and she to me. It was impossible to wound her. The 
most important thing in the world was not to disappoint 
her. She expected something of me, renouncement. She 
expected me to spare her son. She asked for my life, my 
freedom, two little things I could give her, so that she would 
not be disappointed. I must give them to her. It would 
be beautiful to make her happy. That was wonderful. 
Whatever happened she would always know. There would 
be something fine between us. We would be together. I 
would belong to her and she to me: two women who had 
understood something together. 

I touched her hand. I saw that her eyes were filled wiih 
tears. Her fingers clutched mine. “Ma pauwre enfant, 
ayez pitie de moi,” she quavered. 

“There dear, don’t think of it any more.” 


Jane—Our Stranger 219 

“Wait, at least, until I am dead,” she whispered. I knelt 
beside her, just touching her hand. I was weeping, too, 
now, silently as she was, gently, mute tears. 

“I will never do it,” I said. It seemed to me wonderful 
to give her my freedom, gently, like that, in a whisper, kneel¬ 
ing close to her, not frightening her, asking nothing, putting 
things right, easily, at the cost of all my life. 


IV 


I DID not go to America until the following year, and 
then I went alone, leaving Jinny with your mother. 
You remember about that, how after all they made me 
leave my child behind as a hostage. We won’t dwell on it 
now. It was only significant in so far as it showed me that 
my new intimacy with your mother was not quite what I had 
believed it to be. 

As for St. Mary’s Plains, it gave me a different welcome 
from the one I had expected. It disapproved of me and 
showed it. My people went for me. They greeted me with 
the proprietary affection that claims the right to outspoken 
criticism. On the whole, I liked that. It was a relief. Al¬ 
though at first I was bewildered, amused and occasionally 
annoyed by their vigorous upbraiding, I was glad that they 
felt entitled to treat me as they did: their scolding gave me a 
feeling of their solidarity with me. And it was refreshing 
to find myself among a group of people who had no respect 
for my fortune but blamed me honestly for being so dis¬ 
gustingly rich and doing so little good with my money. 

Paris gossip had reached St. Mary’s Plains. I had 
thought it so far away, so safe. I was mistaken. Many ac¬ 
quaintances had been going back and forth across the Atlan¬ 
tic carrying information, more or less correct, of my doings. 
The fact that my husband was no longer living with me was 
variously interpreted. Had I come rushing home for refuge 
that first summer they would have been on my side, but I 
had not. I seemed to have cynically accepted his liaison 
with another woman and was brazenly continuing my 
worldly life. 

My Aunt Patience, as I came gradually to realize, had 
220 


221 


Jane—Our Stranger 

been the person least affected by these tales. She lived the 
life of a hermit, wrapped up in her studies, and had refused 
to listen to gossip. “I guess Jane herself tells me what she 
wants me to know,” she had said to more than one busy¬ 
body, but of course I suspected nothing of all this on ar¬ 
rival. I had gone to America because of an unquenchable 
longing to be with my own people, but I was not without a 
certain feeling of pride. I was scarcely fatuous enough to 
consider myself as a martyr, but it did seem to me that I 
had suffered, through no fault of my own and had taken my 
troubles with a respectable calm. Philibert was still wan¬ 
dering about Europe with Bianca. I had heard nothing 
from him directly. An occasional message reached me 
through his solicitors, that was all. I had continued to 
carry on. I was keeping my promise to your mother. 

My Aunt Patty came to New York to meet my steamer. 
I saw her from the deck, before the ship was in dock, a 
powerful figure, something elemental about her, reducing 
others to insignificance; I waved. She looked at me but 
made no sign; she did not recognize me. As I came down 
the gangway I saw her peering about in the crowd still 
searching, and when I walked up to her and said “Aunt 
Patty, it’s me, Jane,” she dropped her large black handbag 
and gave a gasp. She of course was the same, only more 
so, bigger and grander, with her black mackintosh flapping, 
her bonnet askew and wisps of grey hair hanging down, a 
grand old scarecrow. How she hugged me, her long arms 
round me, people jostling us. That was a blissful mo¬ 
ment. I was perfectly happy for that moment, a child at 
rest and comforted. 

Then she said, “Where’s your baby?” 

“I didn’t bring her, Aunt.” 

“Oh!” Her face fell. 

“I couldn’t, Aunt, such a long trip for such a short visit, 
and her father wouldn’t let her come.” 

“I see.” She shut her grim lips. It was clear that she 
was very disappointed. 


222 Jane—Our Stranger 

We were to take the train that night for St. Mary’s Plains. 
There was some confusion about my luggage and trouble 
about getting it across the city. I seemed to have a great 
deal. A great deal too much, my Aunt said. Celestine had 
a difference of opinion with the porters and scolded them in 
her high, voluble, native tongue. My Aunt did not know 
what to make of Celestine. 

I was ridiculously excited when we arrived at St. Mary’s 
Plains and drove up Desmoisnes Avenue, and then as our 
taxi stopped and I looked across the grass to that modest 
old house I had a feeling of immense relief. This was my 
home. 

The Grey House welcomed me kindly. It had shrunk in 
size. It had grown shabby and ugly, but it had the charm 
of an old glove or shoe, much worn. I loved it with grati¬ 
tude and pity and an ache of regret. 

Standing in the front hall I knew that its spirit was un¬ 
changed. My mind reached out comfortably to its furthest 
corners, to the cupboards on the back stairs and the pantry 
sink that I knew as I knew my own hand. I remembered 
the smell of the carpet on the dark stairs and the way the 
Welsbach burner sizzled on the landing, spreading a round 
of light on the stained wall. My room was just as I had left 
it twelve years before. The white counterpane on the nar¬ 
row bed, the flat pillow, the rag rug on the waxed floor 
that my Aunt Beth had made for me when I broke my arm 
falling off the stepladder. 

Patience changed for dinner into a black silk blouse and 
serge skirt. Her high collar was fastened with an oval 
brooch of gold, the only ornament I ever saw her wear. 
There were two servants in the house, a cook and a house¬ 
maid. I suspected that one had been got in for my visit. 
It was clear to me that she was poor, even poorer than she 
had been. The house was not too clean and very shabby. 
Patience Forbes was no housekeeper. She never cared what 
she had to eat or poked into comers to find dust. The draw¬ 
ing-room looked forlorn in the pale gas light. I gathered 


Jane—Our Stranger 223 

that she never sat there but spent all her time in the museum 
among her precious specimens. The drawing-room made 
me feel dismal. In the days when my Aunt Beth kept house 
it had been a cosy room. Now the old mahogany sofas and 
chairs, covered in frayed black horsehair, were pushed back 
against the wall in ungainly attitudes. They seemed to watch 
me reproachfully. I loved their austere, proud forlornness, 
but I felt uncomfortable. The place did not disappoint me, 
but I felt that I disappointed it. The blurred and misty 
mirrors that held mysteriously behind their marred surfaces 
the invisible reflection of my little grandmother’s sweet face 
and prim figure showed me myself, large, bright and vulgar, 
a great outlandish creature in an exaggerated dress, glit¬ 
tering, hard and horrible. I was profoundly disturbed. If 
I looked like that to myself, how must I look to my Aunt 
Patience? I soon found out. She was not a person to 
mince matters. She told me plainly that I looked wicked. 

"Wicked, Aunt?” 

"Yes, Jane, that’s just about it.” 

"But, Aunt, this is terrible. What is it? What shall I 
do about it?” 

She stared at me grimly. "I don’t know. I guess it’s 
everything—your clothes, that'thick bang across your eyes, 
those ear-rings, that red stuff on your lips. It looks bad. 
It makes you look like an ungodly woman.” 

I rubbed off the lip salve and took off the ear-rings. "Is 
that better?” 

"Humph. A little.” Suddenly I saw her face quiver, 
her mouth twist. I crossed to her and knelt on the floor be¬ 
side her, put my arms round her and looked into her work¬ 
ing face. 

"Aunt, tell me, what’s the matter? Tell—” 

"There, Jane, I’m an old fool.” She tried to laugh but 
failed. Her voice cracked. "I can’t help it. You’re so 
different that I’m scared. Janey, Janey, you’ve no call to 
be so different.” She put her large worn hands on my 
shoulders. 


224 J ANE —C* UR Stranger 

“I’m not changed in my heart, Aunt.” 

“Are you sure?” 

“I am sure.” 

“There ain’t nothing real wrong with you, Jane?” 

“No, Aunt.” 

“You can tell me solemnly that your heart’s not changed, 
that you’ve come to no harm?” 

I looked into her eyes. Humbly, I knelt and looked into 
those honest eyes, not beautiful, with blistered, opaque 
irises, the whites yellow now with age. I knew what she 
meant, and I knew what would put things right between us. 
If I told her everything, all about Philibert and Bianca and 
my own loneliness she would give me the sympathy I 
wanted. Then all her criticism and disappointment would 
be swallowed up in pity. I hesitated. I did not believe that 
she knew anything of my troubles with Philibert. I had 
never written her one word about being unhappy. My hap¬ 
piness, I knew, was the most precious thing on earth to her. 
How, then, tell her now, and why? Break her old heart 
so that she might comfort me ? Sadden the remaining years 
of her life that I might enjoy the luxury of being under¬ 
stood? And how explain? What could she ever under¬ 
stand of such things? She was an innocent woman. 

So I lied. I chose my words in order to keep as near to 
truthfulness as I could. 

“No, Aunt, I have come to no harm. I am just the same 
as the girl who left you twelve years ago. My looks, why 
should they matter to you, Aunt? They are not my own. 
All that is just dressmakers and hairdressers and the people 
round me. I have grown to look like them there, but I am 
more like you and yours than you think. I have been so 
home-sick, Aunt. I have longed so longingly for this, just 
this, Aunt, just to come home.” 

Her face had changed, her eyes searched mine wistfully 
now. 

“You are unhappy, child.” 

“No, Aunt.” 


225 


Jane—Our Stranger 

“Your husband?” 

I felt myself turn pale as she held my head between her 
hands. What could I safely say? There was a look in her 
face that frightened me. Did she know after all? Had she 
heard ? 

“Aunt, he is a Frenchman, different from us.” 

“But is he a good man?” 

“Yes.” 

“True to you as you are to him?” 

“Yes.” 

For a moment longer she looked at me closely, then with a 
sigh of relief leaned back. “I believe you, Jane, I always 
said it wasn’t true. I couldn’t believe my girl wouldn’t tell 

ff 

me. 

I buried my head in her knees. I felt sick and guilty, 
and as I knelt there I saw that long ago I had thrown over 
my Aunt Patience for your mother, though I loved Patience 
Forbes better than any one in the world. 

Presently she said humorously with her slow American 
twang—“Well, I guess I’ll have to get used to your looks, 
Jane, and not be silly, but I reckon it would be easier if your 
voice weren’t so French. You’ve got a queer sort of ac¬ 
cent. I don’t know what all your aunts and uncles will say 
when they see you. I expect if you explain it’s just the 
effect of the world you’ve come from they’ll think it’s a 
pretty queer world.” 

But I had no intention of explaining myself to my rela¬ 
tives. Aunt Patty had the right to bring me to book, but no 
one else had. It seemed to me that night, lying awake in my 
cool, puritan bed, rather funny to think of the people of St. 
Mary’s Plains holding me to account. What had I done, 
after all, to come in for a scolding? I had told my aunt I 
was unchanged. In a sense it was true. If I had not been 
the same I should not have wanted to come. 

I could hear Celestine fussing about in the next room. 
Celestine was going to be a thorn in the side of the Grey 
House. She was out of place. There she was surrounded 


226 Jane— Our Stranger 

by my clothes. My clothes looked horribly gawdy littered 
all over that room. Presently her light was extinguished. 
I lay in the dark between the sheets that smelled of lavender, 
my eyes open in the kind familiar darkness, and told myself 
that it was true, that I was unchanged, the same—the very 
same person that had lain in that bed in that same homely 
safe obscurity years before—and for a time, the sounds and 
the unseen but palpable presences round me, seemed to agree, 
to reassure me. 

I heard the tram rumbling by up the Avenue, I could see 
in my mind's eye, the arc light above the street shining on 
the high branches of the elm trees, the comfortable houses 
set back in their grass plots, shrouded in shadow, lighted 
windows showing here and there, and beyond them to the 
West, I knew was the river, filled with the dark hulls of 
ships, lumber schooners from the great lakes, pleasure boats, 
tugs, their red lights riding high above the black water. 
From the side of my bed my mind could move surely out 
through the night among known objects, along familiar and 
friendly streets, past houses and shops and churches, all ac¬ 
quainted with me as I was with them. And I felt the furni¬ 
ture of the room was kindly, sedate and prim, taking me for 
granted, assuming that all was well, that I belonged there 
—but did I? Was it true? The years seemed to have been 
rolled up, as if the intervening time were a parchment 
scroll, put away in a corner, but there was something else, 
something different that could not be put away. It was in 
me. It existed in my blood, in my body. It was restless 
and it gnawed me. No—no—it was not true. I was not 
the same. No miracle could undo what had been done to 
me. No relief could obliterate from my mind what I had 
learned. I was old—I was tired and corrupt—something 
irrevocable had happened to me—something final and fatal, 
that no longing and no prayers could ever exorcise. 

St. Mary’s Plains had “got a move on” during my ab¬ 
sence, so my relatives told me. I saw as much. It had en- 


Jane—Our Stranger 227 

tered upon one of those sensational periods of industrial 
success that come to American towns so unexpectedly. 
Some one had invented a stove, some one else a motor car. 
Former modest citizens were making millions and building 
factories. Down town was encroaching on the pleasant 
shady districts of up town. The lots on either side of the 
Grey House had been bought by a syndicate who proposed 
to put there a hotel and an apartment building. The Grey 
House would be sandwiched in between them. It would 
become a little dark, building at the bottom of a well, but Pa¬ 
tience Forbes had refused to sell, though the price offered 
her would have left her more than comfortably off for the 
rest of her life. I asked leave to buy the Grey House from 
her for greater security, but she refused. “Pm safe enough, 
Jane, because I don’t want money. No man alive can make 
me sell if I don’t want to. You’ve no call to worry about 
me. 

My Uncle Bradford was not in town but there were a 
great many other family connections who came to see us and 
asked us to come to them for large hospitable succulent 
meals. They greeted me with hearty kisses and hand¬ 
shakes. “Well, Jane, glad to see you home at last. Hope 
you left your husband well.” And then we settled down 
into chairs. 

“You certainly have changed. You’re real French, aren’t 
you? We’ve heard a lot about your doings. It sounds 
pretty funny to us, giving parties all the time to crowned 
heads, aren’t you?” This from the men, or from the 
women more gently— 

“Dear, couldn’t you have brought your baby? We’re so 
disappointed. Yes, you do seem different, but we hope 
you’re happy. We can’t imagine your life, you know. It 
seems so empty, so artificial. The papers give such strange 
accounts. All those gambling places, your cousin fighting a 
duel, it sounds so strange. France seems to be turning to 
atheism with terrible rapidity. The separation of Church 


228 Jane—Our Stranger 

and State might be good if it led to a spiritual revival, but 
they don’t keep Sunday at all, do they? All the theatres 
are open Sundays they say.” 

The elders were gentle but positive in their disapproval, 
the younger generation frankly intolerant. They had been 
struck by various religious and emotional disturbances that 
had swept the country, evangelical revivals, a thing called 
the “Student Movement,” and a university type of socialism. 
I felt myself being measured up to a certain high standard 
and found lamentably wanting. Had I forgotten their 
standards, I asked myself, or was this something new? 
When they asked me what I was doing with my life I said 
I didn’t know, that it took me about all my time just to live 
it. Wasn’t I interested in anything? Oh, yes, a great many 
things, music especially, and old enamels. They didn’t mean 
that, they meant causes. I didn’t understand. What 
causes, I asked, did they refer to? Women’s suffrage, the 
negro question, sweated labour. No, I was obliged to ad¬ 
mit that women’s suffrage had not interested me and that 
there being no negro question in France I hadn’t thought 
about the subject. As for sweated labour, I supposed it 
did exist in Paris, but that its evils had never been brought 
to my notice. All the young people were espousing causes. 
They quite took my breath away. They believed so hard in 
so many things, and they talked so much about the things 
they believed in. Really they were violent talkers. Their 
fresh young lips uttered with ease the most astounding 
phrases. They were fond of big words. Their talk was a 
curious mixture of undigested literature and startling slang. 
Some of the things they believed in were love, democracy, 
the greatness of the American people and the equality of the 
sexes. What they didn’t believe in they condemned off¬ 
hand. There was for them no quiet region where interest¬ 
ing questions were left pleasantly unanswered. They ab¬ 
horred an unanswered question as nature abhors a 
vacuum. Every topic was a bull to be taken by the horns. 


Jane—Our Stranger 229 

Everything concerned them. There was nothing that was 
not their business. They were crusaders, at war with idle¬ 
ness and cynicism, vowed to the regeneration of the world. 
They went for me, but how they went for me! I was a 
renegade, a back-slider, a poor, misguided victim of an effete 
and vicious foreign country. I had nothing to give them 
of any value. When I talked of the charm of Paris they 
yawned. When I mentioned my friends they called me a 
snob. When I spoke of my activities they laughed in gay 
derision. On the whole I didn’t mind. I was too tired to 
mind. They were so young, so keen, so good to look at, 
so full of hope. I wouldn’t have stopped their talking for 
the world, and I liked them for despising my money. 

I envied them. They were happy, they were free. Deep 
in my heart I suspected that they were right to despise my 
life. In the evenings when they gathered on the shadowy 
verandahs of their comfortable countrified houses, the 
young men with mandolins, the girls in billowy muslin 
dresses, I listened to their laughter and their tinkling music, 
feeling so old, so very old. On those summer nights Aunt 
Patty and I would sometimes sit on the front steps of the 
Grey House as the custom was in the town, and all the 
street would seem to be charged with romance and joy and 
mystery. Through the trees one could see young forms flit¬ 
ting from house to house where lights streamed from hospi¬ 
table windows down across the plots of grass, while on the 
shadowed verandahs young hearts whispered to young 
hearts, whispered of dreams that must come true, gallant, 
innocent dreams. 

And there was the difficulty of religion. They couldn’t 
swallow my having become a Catholic. On the first Sun¬ 
day morning I asked my Aunt Patience if she would like me 
to go to church with her. 

“Why, yes, Jane, but I thought you’d be going to the 
Catholic Church.” 

“I’d rather go with you, Aunt.” 


230 Jane—Our Stranger 

“Come, then.” But I saw that she was troubled. 

“You see, Aunt, I don’t really care what church I go to; 
I’m only a Catholic for social convenience.” 

“That’s too bad, isn’t it?” She was putting on her bon¬ 
net. 

“I don’t know, I don’t seem to have any feeling about it 
one way or another. I never could seem to learn much about 
God, Aunt, don’t you remember?” 

“But don’t you believe in Him, Jane?” 

“Honestly, Aunt, I don’t know. Sometimes I wish I 
could, but that’s when I’m in trouble and only because I 
want some one to help me out. That’s not believing, is it? 
It’s just cowardice.” 

My aunt grunted. “Religion mostly is, but there’s some¬ 
thing else, like what your grandmother had.” 

“Yes, I know.” 

She said no more, and I was grateful to her for taking it 
like that. We were companions in spite of everything. 

But when my Aunt Beth came with her husband to visit 
us things became more difficult. She had taken my turning 
Roman Catholic as a dreadful personal problem of her own, 
and felt, dear little soul, that she must try to bring me back 
to the fold. The result was painful. She came armed with 
tracts and pamphlets, a whole bag full of appalling literature. 
I was greatly astonished, for I remembered her as a very 
gentle little creature. With age she had grown militant in 
the cause of evangelical truth. She took me to camp meet¬ 
ings and prayer meetings. She would come into my room at 
night in her pink flannel dressing gown, her little middle- 
aged face aglow with ecstatic resolve, and would press into 
my hand just one more message, a dreadful booklet, “The 
Murder of God’s Word,” or something of that kind. I was 
at last driven to appeal to my Aunt Patience for protection. 
She took up the cudgels for me. 

“I guess Jane’s all right, Beth, I wouldn’t worry. God’s 
the same, whatever your Church.” 

“But Patty, it’s heathen idolatry, worshipping the Virgin 


Jane—Our Stranger 231 

Mary. The Virgin Mary was just a woman like you and 
me.” 

“Well, dear, what does it matter? Perhaps Jane doesn’t 
worship her in a heathen spirit, do you, Jane?” 

“No, Aunt, Pm afraid I don’t worship her at all.” 

“But think of the Jesuits,” wailed Aunt Beth. 

“I don’t,” snapped Aunt Patty. 

“Patty, I believe you’re in danger of losing your faith.” 

“No, Pm not, Beth, don’t you fret about me. Pve a 
good conscience before my God and my Saviour. Now just 
you leave Jane in peace and trust her to God. That’s what 
you’re told to do in the Bible. Just you trust the Lord. 
He’ll look after Jane.” 

And Beth would be momentarily silenced more by the 
sense of her elder sister’s family authority than by any 
respect for her arguments. 

Aunt Patty and I were happiest when we were left alone. 

In July it became very hot. The back garden was ablaze 
with flowers. Rows of hollyhocks lined the wooden 
fences at either side. Butterflies fluttered in the sun. The 
bee-hives at the bottom of the garden were all a-murmur. 
We spent long hours on the back verandah, and Aunt 
Patty, her knitting needles moving swiftly (she knitted 
a good deal, but always had a book open on her lap), 
would question me about my life in Paris, and I would 
tell her as much of the truth as I could. Her conclusions 
were characteristic. 

“Your set over there doesn’t seem to have too much 
sense,” she would say. “You sound a very giddy lot. You 
take no interest in science, do you ? I don’t suppose you’ve 
any of you an idea of what’s being written and done.” 

“Oh, come, Aunt, some of us are awfully clever. Fan 
knows all about art and music. My sister-in-law paints 
and embroiders quite beautifully, and all our relatives are 
gifted.” 

“Humph, art is all very well, but do you keep up with the 
times ?” 


232 Jane—Our Stranger 

“How do you mean, ‘keep up’?” 

“I mean, child, with what’s going on in the world of 
thought, intellectual progress. They’re making great 
strides in medicine in Germany. France is doing most in 
mathematics. But I daresay you -never heard of Professor 
Lautrand. He lives in Paris. Ever met him ? Ever 
heard of him?” 

“Pm afraid not, Aunt.” 

“Well, there you are, one of the great spirits of the age.” 
And she rubbed her nose with her knitting needle. “A 
noble intellect. His books have opened up for me a new 
'Cvorld. To think you could talk to him and don’t even 
know he’s there! Why, landsakes, Jane, if I were in your 
shoes I’d wait on his doorstep till my bones cracked under 
me.” She laughed. 

“Come and visit me, dear, do, and we’ll have him to lunch 
every day,” I urged. At which she laughed again her 
young, hearty laugh, but with a wistful look in her eyes 
as if the light of a lovely dream glowed a moment before 
her. 

“No, Jane, no. I’m too old to go gallivanting about 
Europe, but I do wish you’d take my a.dvice. You never 
did take any interest in science. If you did you’d not be 
so dependent upon mere human beings. If you’d only 
study geology and biology and the history of races, you’d 
see that human beings are no great shakes, anyhow, and 
don’t count for much, save that they’ve the power of thought. 
Has it ever occurred to you to stop and consider how won¬ 
derful it is that you can think, and how little you avail your¬ 
self of the privilege? Go one day to the Bibliotheque 
Nationale, that’s what it’s called, they’ve got one of my 
books there, and just think for a moment that all that build¬ 
ing is crammed full of the records of man’s thought. 
Stupid, most of it, you’d say, too dull to read, all those 
books. Well, that may be their fault and it may be yours, 
but it’s neither here nor there. The fact is that the record¬ 
ing of knowledge is a miracle.” 


Jane—Our Stranger 233 

Wonderful Patience Forbes, taking me to task for the 
frivolity of my world, sitting on the back verandah, her 
spectacles on the end of her nose, her knitting on her lap, 
her heelless slippers comfortably crossed, her little modest 
volume tucked away on a shelf in the Bibliotheque Nationale • 
She seemed to me very remarkable, and she seems even 
more so now. Time for most of us is just a process of 
disintegration, old age is often pitiful and ugly, but at 
the age of sixty-five Patience Forbes had the heart of a 
child and the robust enthusiasm of a student. She had been 
persuaded by the State Board of Education to write a 
series of text-books on birds, and in the evenings she would 
work in the room she called the museum, and I would sit 
watching her while she chewed her pen, rapped irritably with 
her hard old fingers on the desk, or went down on her knees 
before a shelf of books to look up some reference. Some¬ 
times she would walk the floor and grumble—“Gracious, how 
difficult it is to write a decent sentence. English certainly 
isn’t my strong point. I write like a clucking hen. Style 
never was in my line.” And then she would laugh, her 
young, vigorous, chuckling laugh. 

When I compared my life with hers, how could I not feel 
that there was justice in all that young American condemna¬ 
tion. Patience Forbes was old, she was poor, she went about 
in tram-cars, she worked for her living, and she was happy. 
There was no doubt that she was happy. She envied no 
man and no woman, and asked nothing of any one. She 
would not even let me help her. She said that she had 
everything she wanted and I was bound to believe her. 

Early in August we went up to my Uncle Bradford’s 
camp in the woods at the head of the lake. He had written 
urging us to come and saying that if we didn’t he would 
come down to St. Mary’s Plains as he wanted particularly 
to see me. 

A white steam-boat, with side paddles churning peace¬ 
fully through the water, carried us for a long day and night 
and part of another day west by north-west, past little white 


234 J ANE —Our Stranger 

straggling towns, calling at long piers to deliver mails and 
provisions, moving on and on, farther and farther across 
the wide shining expanse of water, away from the world of 
men. Timber schooners passed us, square-rigged, coming 
down from the great forest lands. The skies were bound¬ 
less and light and high above the water. We moved in mar¬ 
vellous translucent space. The air was new as if the world 
had been created yesterday. 

Uncle Bradford and his sons with their wives and chil¬ 
dren had built themselves log houses on the shore of the 
lake. The forest stretched away behind them as far as the 
Canadian border, and a great tract of it belonged to them, 
with its rivers, its game and its timber. Some of them were 
in the lumber business, others came there merely for the 
summer holidays. I found my Aunt Minnie there, and an 
even greater crowd of youngsters than in St. Mary’s Plains. 
Uncle Bradford, dressed in a red flannel shirt and a som¬ 
brero, ruled his camp like a Russian patriarch, and again I 
found every one interested in things that I had forgotten 
were interesting. There in that glorious pagan world sur¬ 
rounded by virgin forests they worshipped a stern and exact¬ 
ing God, read the Bible, and argued in the evening before the 
blazing log fire as to whether the mind were separate from 
the soul, or evolution incompatible with the principles of 
Christianity. And I wondered at them, for they were not 
afraid of their puritan God, nor weary of endless argument. 
Their consciences were clear. They could look God in the 
face, and their brains, if rather empty, were admirably keen. 

I watched the women. They all seemed to have devoted 
husbands who assumed the sanctity of marriage to be the 
basis of life and took the beauty of their women for granted. 
Extravagant youngsters, how I envied them. Husbands 
who remained faithful lovers, wives who remained innocent 
girls, all contented and unafraid, and with their outspoken¬ 
ness, shy people keeping secret the sacred intimacy of love. 

The children were splendid animals. They liked me and 
included me in their games. We used to go swimming be- 


Jane—Our Stranger 235 

fore breakfast when the heavenly morning was crystal pale. 
I would slip from my cabin and join those little bronze fig¬ 
ures, run through the clearing to the shore and down the 
wooden pier, stand an instant with them all about me breath¬ 
ing in the sweet air, then with a shout all together we would 
dive. I swam as well as any of those boys. It pleases me 
now to remember their respect for my prowess. And I 
could paddle a canoe and throw a ball like a man, and I 
caught the largest fish of all, a fine big salmon trout weigh¬ 
ing fifteen pounds. My thought was—“I want a boy like 
one of these to become a man for Jinny. I want her to 
have a husband from my people.” 

It was a delicious life. The air was fine and dry and 
sharply scented with the 'scent of pine woods drenched in 
sunlight. Each morning was a miracle as clear as the first 
morning of creation. Swift rollicking streams tumbled over 
rocks, fat salmon jumped in deep pools. Mild-eyed Indians 
came travelling down from the depths of the vast forest, 
paddling their lovely canoes of birch bark, laden with grass 
baskets and soft moccasins embroidered in beads. The 
nights were cold. One was lifted up into sleep, one floated 
up and away into sleep under sparkling stars, hearing the 
waves lapping the shore and the wind murmuring through 
the branches of the innumerable pines of the forest that 
spread away, further and further away, endlessly, count¬ 
less trees murmuring a strong chant under the wide sky, 
stretching beyond the edge of the mind’s compass, as far as 
one could think, as far as one’s soul could reach out, the 
forest, the sky, the water, calm, untroubled, eternal. 

Then suddenly something crashed into that crystal space. 

My Uncle Bradford took me one morning to his office. 

“You are nearly thirty now, Jane.” 

“Yes, Uncle.” 

“I have a letter for you from your father. He left it 
with me to deliver to you when you were thirty years old.” 

I took the envelope he handed me. I was trembling. My 
uncle mopped his forehead and cleared his throat. 


236 Jane—Our Stranger 

“You will be absolute owner of your property when you 
are thirty.” 

“Oh,” I said blankly. 

“Yes, you were not to know. It was your father’s wish. 
Did your mother, before she died, tell you anything about 
him?” 

“No, I don’t think so.” 

“Well, I’m sorry. It was her place to tell you. Your 
father is buried out west, in Oregon.” 

“Yes, I know.” 

“He’s not buried in a cemetery. He’s buried on a hill. 
He bought the tract of land himself.” 

I waited. The noises of the camp came cheerily through 
the cabin windows. There was a strong smell of pine wood 
and resin and of bacon frying somewhere out of doors. 

“Your father broke his neck falling down the elevator 
shaft in a New York hotel. The verdict was accidental 
death, but it was not an accident. Your mother knew, and 
I knew.” 

I stood up, staring at him stupidly, holding the letter in 
my fingers, then quickly turned and went out. I crossed the 
camp and struck off into the woods. In a quiet place I sat 
down and opened the letter. It began, “My dear daughter 
Jane.” I know it by heart. This is the letter. 

“My dear daughter Jane: It is time for me to go. A man 
is free to choose his time. This I believe, not much else. I 
am sorry to leave you, but you are only five years old and you 
will be better off with your grandmother in St. Mary’s Plains 
than you would be with me. Your grandmother and your aunts 
will take care of you. They are good women. It’s not their 
fault that they don’t like me. The truth is, Jane, that I’m not 
their kind. I’m nobody’s kind and I’m awful tired of being 
alone in a crowd. This world is getting too full of people for 
me. I want space and I guess I’ll find it where I’m going. 

“I wouldn’t leave you so much money if I knew what to do 
with it. It never did me any good. It was only fun getting, 
not having. At first I worked with my hands—in the earth— 


Jane—Our Stranger 237 

then I found gold. I bought land and more land, built a 
railroad or two, and then Wall Street got me. That was like 
the poker table I’d known when I was a boy working on the 
Chippevale Ranch. That was just excitement, no good to any 
one, but fun for a spell. 

“When you are thirty years old you’ll have as much sense 
as you’re ever going to have. Perhaps you’ll do better than I 
did. Perhaps you’ll know how to spend. I didn’t. I’d like you 
to enjoy what I’ve left you. It would console me some. 

“I’m not a believer in the Cross of Jesus and I don’t want 
it on my grave, but I’m not sure there isn’t something over 
yonder on the other side. I hailed from the far West. It’s 
spoiling now, but a wide prairie and a high sky are the best 
things I know, that and working with your hands. 

“Good-bye, little girl Jane, you’re the only thing I mind leav¬ 
ing behind. I’d kind of like to know what you’ll be like when 
you get this. 

“Your Uncle Bradford’s an honest man, there aren’t many, 
you can trust him. He’ll give you this and explain that there 
was no disgrace. Only I didn’t feel like living any more. 
There are too many people hanging round. I want to get away. 
If I’m doing you a wrong by quitting I ask you to forgive me. 

“Your loving father, 

“Silas Carpenter.” 

I worked it out that night with maps and time-tables. I 
had just enough time to go to Redtown and get back to 
New York to catch my boat. I left the next morning. 
My aunt went with me. Uncle Bradford’s steam launch 
took us down the lake. We caught a train at a place called 
Athens and joined the western express the middle of the 
next day. It took us three days and three nights to get to 
Oregon. We crossed the Mississippi river early one morn¬ 
ing. The next day we thundered through the Rocky Moun¬ 
tains. The plains beyond were immense and stupefying. 

I visited the grave alone. A block of granite, reminding 
me of a druid’s stone, marked the spot on the hill where he 
was buried. It stood up stark and solid on the bare 
ground. It looked as if it had been left there endless ages 


238 Jane—Our Stranger 

before by some slow, gigantic movement of nature, some 
glacier travelling by inches from the north, or some heav¬ 
ing of the earth’s surface. One side of it was polished and 
bore an inscription cut. into the stones :— 

“HERE LIES SILAS CARPENTER, WLO WAS BORN IN THIS 
PLACE BEFORE IT WAS A TOWN AND WHO DIED IN NEW 

york on January 5TH 1885.” 

From the hill-top one had a view of the city lying along 
the sea, a new, bright city, an unfriendly sea of a dazzling 
blue. I sat down on the grass by the great stone. Here, 
at last, was something that belonged to me and to no one 
else. No one would dispute with me the possession of my 
father’s grave. I felt excited and uplifted as if I had come 
into a precious inheritance. And yet what had he left me ? 
A message of failure, an unanswered question, a sense of 
not having counted for him enough myself to keep him on 
the earth. He had shuffled me off with the rest of it. My 
mother must have hated him. $he must have had some¬ 
thing to do with his giving it up like that. I would have 
loved him. I would have understood him. If he had 
waited for me we would have been good companions. If he 
had lived I would never have gone to Paris. I would have 
gone west with him to his wide prairie and high skies. 
Everything would have been different. I had missed some¬ 
thing. What had I missed? I looked out across the dry 
grass, the rolling hills, the big, bare, blazing land, the glitter¬ 
ing sea under the windy sun, and I recognized it as mine. I 
had missed my life. I had taken the wrong turn. 

We boarded the train again next day and recrossed the 
continent of America. It took us seven days and nights to 
reach New York. We passed through Denver, Chicago, 
Cleveland, and countless other cities. We crossed deserts 
white as sand and overgrown with cactus. In the middle of 
the Mohawa desert we stopped at a place called Bagdad to 
give the engine a drink of water. Bagdad was a single 


Jane—Our Stranger 239 

wooden shed standing in a waste of sand. Bagdad, Bagdad. 
It was very hot in the train. My aunt and I sat most of 
the time on the open platform at the end of the observation 
car, watching the earth fly from under the train and drink¬ 
ing iced drinks that the coloured porters brought us. It is 
very exciting to be in a train like that, rushing across the 
earth at such speed, suspended in space as if on a giant 
bridge, and the vast, the immense, the overwhelming pano¬ 
rama flying endlessly past. Cities, rivers, prairies, moun¬ 
tains, lonely farms the steel jaws of stations engulfing you, 
out again through the crowding buildings of a city you will 
never know, full of people you will never see, into the open, 
the horizon endlessly wheeling, the earth under the train 
flying backwards, but the far edge of the earth towards the 
horizon wheeling with you. Thundering along, the pound¬ 
ing of the engine, the grinding wheels exciting your brain 
to a special liveliness, the train is a miraculous thing a steel 
Comet cushioned inside imitating a dwelling, but a long comet 
whirring through space, a blaze of flying light by night, a 
streak and a noise by day, and from it you look out upon a 
thousand worlds flying past, and you have glimpses, instant, 
quick glimpses, of countless mysterious lives, a group of 
children hanging over a fence waving, a farmer in a wide 
straw hat sitting in a blue wagon at a railway crossing, a 
boundless golden field behind him of innumerable garnered 
sheaves all gold, a village like a collection of wooden boxes, 
saddled horses tethered to a rope in front of an unpainted 
post office. Cowboys driving cattle, rolling prairies, horses, 
wild, running, kicking up their heels, a lonely cabin against 
a hill, hens scratching outside, thin smoke coming from the 
wobbling iron smoke stack, lost in the boundless blue; 
families moving, all their household goods piled on wagpns, 
the men walking beside the horses with long whips, a mail 
coach lurching along a mountain road, the driver has a Colt 
revolver in his pocket. You know that. You hope he’ll 
get the highway robbers who will be waiting for him at 
dark. Bret Harte wrote about him. And now Walt Whiu 


240 Jane—Our Stranger 

man’s country—Leaves of Grass—a great poem, the great¬ 
est. He knew. He had found out. He understood the 
giant, the great urge of life, in this my country. 

And I thought of my father, crossing and recrossing the 
continent, restless, lonely, powerful, dissatisfied, an isolated 
man moving up and down the land, handling money, gam¬ 
bling with money, not knowing what to do, growing tired 
of it all. 

I said to my aunt—“It was twenty-five years ago, but it 
brings him close.” 

“Your father’s death?” 

“Yes, it makes a difference.” 

“How?” 

“I’m with him. It clears the ground.” 

I did not quite know what I meant then, but I know now. 

We reached New York. I was suddenly filled with fore¬ 
boding. In the high window of our towering hotel I sat 
with Patience far into the night. We sat together like 
watchers in a tower, and a million lighted windows shone 
before us in the blue night. 

“I am afraid, Aunt.” 

“Why, my child?” 

“I am afraid to leave you.” 

“Yes, I know.” 

How much did she know, I wondered? What did she 
suspect? Philibert had not written to me, of course. She 
must have noticed. She must know a good deal. 

“You have your little girl, Jane. Think of her.” 

“I do. She’s a prim little thing, not a bit like me.” 

“Promise me to love your child, to love her enough.” 

“Enough for what, dear?” 

“Just enough; you’ll find out how much that is.” 

“I will try to love her as you have loved me, Aunt, al¬ 
ways.” 

She gripped my hand. “Janey,” she muttered, “my girl.” 
We sat a long time silent. The desire to unburden all my 
heart was unbearable. But it was too late now. 


Jane—Our Stranger 241 

“Europe is too full of people, Aunt. They have made the 
earth into a trivial thing. It is not good for people to sub¬ 
due the earth. In Paris one is never out of doors. I don’t 
feel at home there. I am sick for my own country, for a 
wide prairie and a high sky.” 

“You’ll come back again, Jane.” 

“Yes,” I answered, “I will come back.” 

I thought she was asking for a promise. I did not know 
that she was stating a prophecy. 

And in the morning I went aboard my ship and my aunt 
left me and went down the gangway onto the pier, and the 
ship moved slowly away from the dock. There she was 
again, standing in the crowd in her queer black clothes, but 
this time the water between us was widening. She lifted 
both her arms to me in a last large gesture of full embrace, 
then her arms fell to her sides, and she stood there buffeted 
by the wind, jostled by the crowd, a strong old woman, look¬ 
ing after me bravely. I had a desperate moment. I wanted 
to jump, to swim back. I felt an agony of regret, of long¬ 
ing, of warning. I struggled. It was horrible, such pain. 
What did it mean? Why was I going? It was wrong, it 
was wrong. 

I never saw her again. 


V 


I SLIPPED back into Paris, its pleasant walls closed 
round me, and the voice I had heard over there, in my 
wide country was hushed. It was like coming out of a 
great open space into a room. There was all at once about 
me a multitude of nice pretty things, a shimmer of lights, a 
harmony of bright sounds, the smooth, soothing, flattering 
touch of luxury. No whisper of elemental forces could 
penetrate here. Men of incomparable taste and limited 
vision had made this place to suit themselves. 

Jinny was waiting for me, a prim fairy with starry eyes, 
standing daintily on tip-toe to be kissed, smoothing her white 
frock carefully after my hug. She told me that she had 
seen her Papa. He had been on a visit to Grand* mere! 
He had given her a strawberry ice in the Bois and had taken 
her to see Punch and Judy. Then he had gone far away 
to a country where old kings were buried and one rode on 
camels across the sand. The Gnignol had been very amus¬ 
ing, but she had agreed with her papa that she was rather 
old for Punch and Judy. Some day he would come back 
and take her to big parties. I looked at Jinny, little Jinny, 
who didn’t like to be hugged, pirouetting on one toe and 
looking at herself in the glass, and I remembered my promise 
to Patience Forbes. It wasn’t enough to dote on my child, 
to crave her sweetness, her caresses, her laughter. There 
would be a struggle. There would be endless things. I saw 
them coming, all the events of her poor little life, so spec¬ 
tacular in its setting. I was there to ward them off, to chal¬ 
lenge fate and the future, to love her with enough wisdom 
and enough tenacity and enough self-abasement to—well, 
to see her through. 


242 


Jane—Our Stranger 243 

And I had an idea that she wouldn’t help me much. She 
would perhaps always .be content to curtsey to herself in 
the glass. I felt this, but I felt it with less keenness than I 
expected. There seemed something a little unreal about 
struggling desperately to ward off evil from my child. 
There were flowers in the room, orchids and violets and 
roses, sent to greet me. A sheaf of letters, invitations to 
lunch, to dine, to listen to music. The first night of the 
Russian Ballet was announced for the following week. 
Rodin asked me to his studio to see a new bronze. Beauty 
all about me, amusement, stimulus, within easy reach, treas¬ 
ures of pleasure like sugared fruit hanging from fantastic 
branches waiting to be plucked. 

Your mother’s kiss of greeting showed me that Phili¬ 
bert’s visit had made a difference. It was a cold, gay little 
peck and was accompanied by nervous pats and hurried 
playful remarks on a high, forced note. Clearly she was 
nervous. Almost, it seemed, as if she were afraid of me. 
Poor little belle-mere. She had fallen in love with her son 
all over again, but why need that make her afraid of me? 
I was disappointed and annoyed by her renewed subter¬ 
fuges. It seemed to me strange that she should think I 
would begrudge her the pleasure her son could still give 
her. I thought of explaining my feelings to Claire, but 
Claire was not in a receptive mood and there was after all 
nothing to be gained by it. I was a little tired of explain¬ 
ing. I was, I found, even a little tired of the de Joigny 
family. My obligations to them and theirs to me seemed 
less important since my return. It occurred to me that I 
had taken myself and my problems with a ridiculous serious¬ 
ness. I was still very fond of your mother, but I no longer 
asked of her the impossible. All that I now wanted of the 
family was a sufficiently respectable show of approval and 
a mild give-and-take of friendliness. I felt equal to living 
a life of my own and I proposed doing so. When you sug¬ 
gested giving a dinner for me in your rooms I was delighted. 
You promised me Ludovic and half a dozen of the best 


244 Jane—Our Stranger 

brains in Paris. That seemed to me an excellent way to 
begin. 

Aunt Clothilde sent for me one morning a few days later. 
I found her in bed under an immensely high canopy of crim¬ 
son damask, sipping a cup of the richest chocolate, a coarse, 
white cambric cap, like a peasant woman’s, tied under her 
double chin, her wig hung on the bed-post. The room was 
vast and stuffy and dark and hung with dingy tapestries. 
On one side of the bed sat her dame de compagnie , knit¬ 
ting, on the other a frightened priest with a sallow, perspir¬ 
ing face. Aunt Clo waved a plump hand as I came in. The 
duenna and the priest rose hurriedly. 

“No, mon Pete, I won’t help you. You are no doubt a 
saintly man, but that’s not enough for the business in hand. 
You’ve not got the brains. You couldn’t preach to a lot of 
worldly women, you’re too timid. Look at yourself now. 
You’re trembling before a wicked old woman who may have 
some influence with the Archbishop but has none whatever 
with Saint Peter. Come, mon Pere, brace up and go to 
the heathen. There’s a nice post vacant in Madagascar. 
I’ll put in a word for you there if you like.” 

The poor man’s face worked painfully. He murmured 
something and scuttled away across the great room. The 
little companion held open the door for him and followed 
him out. 

Aunt Clothilde turned to me. “Blaise,” she began at 
once, motioning me to sit down, “has asked me to dine with 
him. Does he dine ? Has he a cook ? He says so, but how 
do I know? What will he give me to eat? He says the 
dinner is for you. Since when has he taken to giving his 
sister-in-law dinners? He wants me to put you in counte¬ 
nance, and to impress his disreputable bohemian friends. 
He says they are all geniuses. What is a genius? Your 
mother-in-law thinks they all died in the seventeenth cen¬ 
tury. She may be right. How can one be sure? And why 
should I dine with a genius? Is that a reason? He prom¬ 
ises me, as if it were a favour, that man Ludovic, a monster 


Jane—Our Stranger 245 

with greasy grey curls who worships an Egyptian cat. 
Blaise says he is a very great scholar and that you deserve 
a little pleasure. Will you find pleasure in his old scholar? 
Why should you? I’d rather have a beautiful young fool 
myself. It appears the family is horrid to you. Is that so? 
Wouldn’t let you take your child to America, eh? Well, I 
don’t mind having a dig at the family. Tiresome people, 
always splitting hairs. And you’re a good girl. You’ve got 
pluck, but I thought you were going to hurt Bianca that 
night.” She chuckled. “Well, what do you think? Shall 
I come to this dinner to meet your crazy friends?” 

“They’re not mine, Aunt, I don’t know them.” 

“You know Clementine, she likes you. She’s all right, 

a Bourbon and a S-on her mother’s side, but of course 

as mad as a March hare, and no morals. She doesn’t need 
’em. But don’t take after her, you’ve got ’em and you need 
’em. All Anglo-Saxons are like that. Take care. Of 
course it would be no more than Philibert deserves.” 

I laughed. “You talk, Aunt, as if Blaize’s friends weren’t 
proper.” 

“Proper, what’s that? Aren’t they just the most dis¬ 
reputable people on earth? Isn’t that why they’re amus¬ 
ing ? Really clever people are never proper. It takes every 
drop of Clementine’s blue blood to keep her afloat, and that 
man Felix! these writers with their habits of sleeping all 
day, Blaise tells me he is writing a play without words. It 
must be witty. En voild une occasion pour faire de Vesprit. 
And the Spaniard, the painter, it appears that he wants to 
do a fresco for my music room. Well, he won’t. Only, if 
he doesn’t for me, he will for Frangois. Blaise says he’s 
the greatest mural painter since Tiepolo. I detest that 
f Trompe VoeiV school, but I’d like to spite Frangois. What 
do you think? I’m very poor this year. I sold a forest 
for half its value. Now then, what about Philibert—gone 
to Egypt with his little salamander, has he ?” 

“I believe so, Aunt.” 

“And you ? You don’t look very sad.” 


246 Jane—Our Stranger 

“I don’t think I am, Aunt.” 

‘‘Good, excellent; you console yourself, eh?” 

“No, Aunt, I don’t; not, that is, in the way you mean.” 

“Rubbish; don’t look so virtuous, child. If you haven’t 
already, you soon will. We all" do. It’s a law of nature. 
My husband was the dullest man on earth, I couldn’t abide 
him. If he hadn’t been the first Duke of France no one 
would ever have asked him to dinner. How do you think 
I put up with him for twenty years? You find me an ugly 
old woman, very fat, very fond of good cooking. My child, 
there are only two kinds of pleasure worth having in this 
world, and one of them has to do with the stomach. I’ve 
enjoyed both. I now only enjoy one. That’s enough. 
What a face you make at me! If you go against the laws 
of nature you’ll get into trouble.” 

“But, Aunt, seriously, these clever friends of Blaise—are 
they disreputable?” 

“Child, child, how boring you are, you Americans have 
such literal minds. All I mean is that they’ve no moral 
sense. They’ve something else though in its place, some¬ 
thing better, perhaps, or worse, anyhow more discriminat¬ 
ing.” 

“I see.” 

“No, you don’t, but it doesn’t matter. You’ve a moral 
sense that bothers the life out of you. Now go along with 
you. I must get up. I’ll come to your party. Your 
mother-in-law won’t approve. She’s a superior person. As 
for you, God knows what you’ll be in ten years time with 
such a husband and such a conscience. I had better keep an 
eye on you. In the choice of a lover you can ask my ad¬ 
vice. I know men. They’re nt>t worth much, but you don’t 
take or refuse one for that reason. You’ve found that out 
for yourself by now.” 

She dismissed me, waving again her little fat hand from 
under the immense canopy of her bed. 

I left her, amused and rather exhilarated. A wicked old 
woman and a very great lady. It didn’t occur to me to take 


Jane—Our Stranger 247 

her seriously, but I liked her. All the same, the last thing 
I wanted was a lover. The mere thought filled me with dis¬ 
gust. 

Your dinner was awfully nice, Blaise dear. I remember 
the evening well. A few snowflakes softly floated down in 
your little courtyard as old Albert, your manservant, in his 
ancient green coat, opened the door. He had cooked the 
dinner and arranged the table and made the fire in the liv¬ 
ing room and put the champagne on ice; I knew that, but 
his manner was of a fine, calm formality as he ushered Aunt 
Clo and myself into your presence. A group of men who 
somehow impressed one as not at all ordinary, and a bright 
little lady dressed like a parrot, in a tiny, shabby, candle-lit 
room, filling the place comfortably with their easy good- 
humour, that was my first impression, followed quickly by 
others, pleasant, special impressions, aspects sharp and neat 
in an atmosphere that gave one a feeling of tasting a fine 
subtle flavour. Each person in the room was an individual 
unlike any one else. With no beauty to speak of, several 
were old men in oddly cut clothes, they were more interesting 
to watch than any lovely creature. Their faces were worn 
and lined and gentle, thin masks through which one saw the 
fine play of intelligence. Some were already known to the 
great world of thought and public afifairs, others have since 
become so, but all were simple, homely men that night, with 
a certain childlike gaiety that was very appealing. 

Albert’s food was excellent; succulent, substantial food 
that suggested the provinces. The wine was very old. For 
a moment as I watched your convives inhaling the bouquet 
from lifted glasses, I imagined myself far away in Balzac’s 
country, a snowy street of silent houses stretching out be¬ 
tween high poplars to a great river, a carriage at the door, 
with a postillion in a three-cornered hat, waiting to drive me 
to some romantic rendezvous. But the talk swept me along 
with its merry-go-round of the present. 

I cannot, after all these years, recall what was said, im¬ 
possible to recapture now the quick turns of wit, the dry 


248 Jane—Our Stranger 

little jokes, the swift touches of poetry, that followed each 
other with such rapid intellectual grace. It was all incredi¬ 
bly rapid. I could just manage to keep up with the sense 
of it. I didn’t attempt to take part. Ideas were as thick 
in that room as confetti at a fete. Clementine, in an apple- 
green dress, with a round red spot of rouge on either cheek, 
swayed this way and that in response to innumerable sallies, 
her face changing like lightning. She was a match for those 
men. Her wit played over the history of her country like a 
jolly little ferret nosing out and pouncing upon joke and 
anecdote from the vast field of the past. Cardinals, princes, 
and ruffians were held up to ridicule. International affairs 
were dealt with clearly and deftly by her cutting tongue. 
She played with the ideas round her as if they were a swarm 
of brilliant darting winged creatures. Her delight in this 
battle of wit was contagious. The talk grew faster and 
faster. Soon every one was talking at once. No one could 
finish a sentence. 

Cambon was explaining to Aunt Clothilde why the Gov¬ 
ernment would not tolerate an Ambassador to the Pope. 
Clementine was defending the English, no one appeared to 
like the English. Felix was making fun of Diaghilev, the 
new Russian who had appeared with his Imperial Ballet a 
week before. 

What delightful people! Certainly without reservation 
of any kind I find them now as I did then the most delight¬ 
ful people in the world. Ludovic wore a celluloid collar. 
His body was too heavy for his legs and his head too big for 
his body; no matter; his profound, quiet gaze and tired, 
brown face expressed a nobility that made one ashamed of 
noticing his ill-cut coat. Felix looked like a faun. With 
his exaggerated features thrust forward into the candle-light 
he said funny, penetrating things that kept Aunt Clo chuck¬ 
ling. I watched, fascinated. These were the people Aunt 
Clo called disreputable, utterly lacking in a moral sense. 
Were ever sinners so joyous, so light-hearted? Rebels 
against creeds, against the fixed order of society, against the 


Jane—Our Stranger 249 

didactic spoken word, they were kind to me, the Philistine, 
exerting at once and with unconscious ease the most disarm¬ 
ing charm. 

Vaguely I recalled the mentality of my American home. 
It was there behind me, like a cold and lifeless plaster cast 
behind a curtain. Here was something infinitely more inter¬ 
esting, something brilliantly living, something merry and 
subtle and fine that defied disapproval. The powers of 
evil? Chimeras! No room for them here, no room for 
anything dismal and boring. I felt an uplift, it was like an 
awakening. All that horror of soul searching, all the dreary 
puritan A. B. C. of right and wrong was a childish night¬ 
mare. These people understood the world. They made 
fun of evil. They loved each other and found no fault with 
their friends. Under their gaiety was a deep sympathy for 
poor humanity. 

They said things that would have sent St. Mary’s Plains 
reeling with horror into one large devastating revival meet¬ 
ing. If St. Mary’s Plains could have dreamed of the char¬ 
acter of their conversation it would call upon God to destroy 
them. I laughed. Albert filled my glass. 

Some one was saying— 

“Time is a circle.” 

“The sunrise, why the same sun? Who knows?” 

“Truth? Why should one want truth? Truth is a thing 
we have invented. An accurate statement of facts? But 
there is no accuracy except in mathematics, and in mathe¬ 
matics there are no facts.” 

Were they joking? Or were they serious? Both. I 
felt like a schoolgirl, very ignorant, very crude, with a stiff 
blank mind like a piece of cardboard. They slowed down 
to listen to Ludovic. I remember Ludovic speaking to them 
all with his eyes smiling under their spiky grey eyebrows. 
I think I remember what he said. It was the first time I 
had heard him talk, as he talked to me so often afterwards. 

“I sit in some old city of the past and look back upon the 
present and still further back into the future. Why not? 


250 Jane—Our Stranger 

Time is an endless circle, wheeling around one. Why 
trouble to imagine a beginning or an end? Why these un¬ 
natural conceptions? The old legends are more sensible. 
The ancient mystic symbol of matter, Ouroborro, the tail- 
devourer, a serpent coiled into a circle, symbol of evolution, 
of the evolution of matter. There is something there, some¬ 
thing to think of. Let us all think of molecules, and re¬ 
member the Philosopher’s Stone. Have you ever laughed 
at the legend of the Philosopher’s Stone that can transmute 
metals and give the elixir of life? What if it were discov¬ 
ered, this stone? Suppose radium were in the legend stone 
of long ago. Wouldn’t that suggest to you that we have 
only just discovered out of the long labour of our known 
cycle of civilization something that was known before by 
another race of men? Who knows, perhaps that race con¬ 
quered its earth with this stone, turned it from a savage 
planet like this of ours into a Garden of Eden, and then, 
surfeited with ease, died of inertia, lapsed into darkness, 
fell from the Heaven it had made. That is to say, Adam, 
the father of our race, may have been the last survivor of 
a race of fallen gods, supermen.” 

Clementine took my arm as we went out of the dining¬ 
room. 

“You find us a little mad?” she asked. 

“Oh, no.” 

“Tell us how you find us. You are different, big and 
strong and young and strange. Your point of view about 
us would be something new.” 

“I find you extraordinarily happy.” 

“Oh yes, we are gay.” 

The men had followed us. 

“We laugh.” 

“We find the world so funny.” 

“But we’re serious too. There’s Ludovic as solemn as a 
trout. He’d be dreary if we let him be.” 

“Only we don’t. Why should one worry? One can’t 


Jane—Our Stranger 251 

change anything. You must be one of us. It’s so amusing 
with us. You will see how amusing it is.” 

So it was that they adopted me. And that night as I 
drove home through the moonlit streets I thought of St. 
Mary's Plains with distaste and impatience. 

But what I remember best of all about that evening was 
the sweet funny way you beamed down the table when you 
saw that your friends liked me. You were, you know, just 
a little nervous about the impression I would make on them. 
They were so much more brilliant than any one else that 
I don’t wonder. But it all went off well, bless your heart, 
thanks to the penetrating sweetness of your will that willed 
us to be pleased with one another. 

There followed years of power and pleasure. Your 
friends made good their promise. They taught me to enjoy. 
Ludovic began to form my mind. Clementine gave me the 
daring to use it. I learned how pleasant it was to follow 
one’s caprices, to indulge one’s tastes, to realize one’s dreams. 
Do you remember the things we did? What indeed didn’t 
we do, with our picture shows, our pantomimes, and our 
music? When we wanted to do a thing we did it. When 
we wanted to go to a place we went. What fun it was go¬ 
ing off at a moment’s notice to Seville, to Constantinople, to 
Moscow. Some one would say—“Have you seen the Place 
Stanislas at Nancy by moonlight? No? But you must.” 
“Let’s go tomorrow,” and we went. Or—“I hear that at 
Grenoble there is a lady who owns a glove shop and who 
has in her back parlour a Manet, let us go and buy it, if it 
is true.” Of course we went and found it was true and 
bought it. Felix it was who took us all the way to Stras¬ 
bourg for one night and day, to eat a pate de foie gras and 
hear mass in the Cathedral. 

But we were happiest of all in Paris. Paris was inex¬ 
haustible. Not a nook or cranny of interest and charm es¬ 
caped us. Sometimes early in the spring mornings we 
would walk through silvery streets or along the quais or take 


252 Jane—Our Stranger 

the penny steamer down the Seine. We sampled every res¬ 
taurant known to our gourmet Felix. We sat in icy studios 
at the feet of shy ogres. Even Degas thawed to us, while 
rare spirits from odd corners of the earth joined us in the 
evenings. And increasingly the beauty of Paris was re¬ 
vealed to me. I cared for it intimately now, and I loved its 
smooth pale historic stones with a delicate sensuousness. 

I was happy. I was as happy as an opium eater. I lived 
in a continuous mood of enjoyment that had the quality of 
a dream. All this was mine to behold and delight in, and 
I was responsible for none of it. I was passive. I was 
calm. The play played itself out about me, and I was in no 
way involved. What people did and what they didn’t do 
had no real significance. When Ludovic said: “A man has 
as much right to take life as to give it,” I thought 
placidly, “Perhaps so, in this world.” When he denounced 
property and capitalists and said we should all be poor, I 
thought, of course, that is so, and when he pointed out to 
me a woman who had killed her father because he was cross¬ 
eyed and got on her nerves, I merely looked at her with 
mild curiosity. He said that she was very sensitive and 
charming, and I believed him. It didn’t seem to matter. 

And if at times it occurred to me that I was becoming 
callous and selfish, at others I felt that I was becoming in¬ 
telligent and charitable. 

Jinny was my one responsibility, a little will-o’-the-wisp 
creature who danced into my room of a morning to drop a 
kiss on my nose and dance out again. Jinny, so entranc- 
ingly pretty, so ridiculously dainty, who never soiled her 
hands or tore her frock or spilled her food, who said her 
prayers night and morning to a silver crucifix that her father 
had sent her from Italy, and who confessed her minute sins 
every Friday to a priest but never confided in her mother. 

My child baffled me. There was nothing in my own 
childhood’s experience that threw any light on the little close 
mystery of her nature. She didn’t like animals, she hated 
romping about, she was afraid of the cold. What she liked 


Jane—Our Stranger 253 

was to be curled up on cushions in front of the fire and listen 
to fairy stories. Her indolence was complete, her capacity 
for keeping still, extraordinary in one who moved so lightly 
when she did move. Sometimes when I looked up from the 
book I was reading aloud to her, I would find her great 
brown eyes fixed on me with a look of uncanny wisdom. 
She seemed to disapprove of me. I wondered if this had 
anything to do with the teaching of her priestly tutors that 
her father had prescribed for her, or whether it sprang 
from a natural precocious feeling of the difference between 
us. We were certainly a strange couple. Even in moments 
of my most anguished tenderness, I could not but feel the in¬ 
congruity. The idea that she was much more her father’s 
daughter than mine was one that I tried not to dwell on. 

I had been going happily along, thinking that I could en¬ 
joy this adventurous life of my new friends without being 
involved in it, when I found out that I was much less free 
than I thought. Your mother did not approve, I knew, and 
I gathered that she blamed you for leading me astray, but 
it came nevertheless as a surprise when she gently inter¬ 
fered. 

“Aren’t you making yourself a little notorious, my child?” 
she asked one day. 

“Notorious belle-mere?” 

“Yes. Dining in restaurants in the company of such 
strange men.” 

“They are not very strange, dear, except in being so very 
intelligent, and I never, at least scarcely ever, dine alone 
with men. There is almost always Clementine.” 

“I know, that’s just it. For a chaperone, you couldn’t 
have chosen worse.” 

“But surely, Belle Mere, I need no chaperone, I am old 
enough to go about alone?” 

She closed her eyes wearily, opened them and spoke 
sharply. 

“French women of good family never go about alone, and 
never dine in public places.” 


254 Jane—Our Stranger 

“But Clementine—” 

“Don’t talk to me of Clementine.” I was startled by the 
sudden note of sharp personal grievance in her voice. “Her 
conduct is scandalous. Her mother was my first cousin and 
dearest friend. It is fortunate that she is dead. How could 
she be blamed for that marriage, yet Clementine always 
blamed her and set to work deliberately to make her 
suffer.” 

“I know nothing of Clementine’s marriage.” 

“Well, her husband—but no matter, there is no excuse 
for her making herself an object of derision.” 

“I scarcely think she does that, dear, she is in great de¬ 
mand you know, in the very highest quarters.” 

“At foreign courts, perhaps, not in her own country. If 
it weren’t for the obligations of kinship no one, but no one 
would speak to her.” 

“Just what is it that she has done that you so disapprove 
of?” 

“She has made herself cheap. She has vulgarized her 
position, she plays at being a bohemian, she has bartered 
away her dignity for a little sordid amusement.” 

“And I?” 

“You are in danger of doing the same, but in greater dan¬ 
ger.” 

I was annoyed and rose and moved to the door. 

“You are going?” 

“I am afraid I must. I have an appointment.” 

“Ah, you resent my speaking to you?” 

“No, dear, but—” 

“But—?” 

“I am afraid I cannot quite agree with you.” 

Her face hardened. I made an effort. 

“Belle-mere, I am doing no wrong. Surely you believe 
that. These men are nothing to me, not one of them.” 

Her eyebrows lifted. “You love no one?” she asked. 

“No.” 

“That too, is just as I thought.” 


255 


Jane—Our Stranger 

“You wouldn’t mind that, I suppose?” 

“Mind it ? How should I ? How would it concern me ?” 

I was a little taken aback. “It only matters then what I 
seem to do, not what I really do?” 

She smiled, rather sarcastically, I thought. “Put it that 
way if you like, my child.” 

“But, belle-mere, don’t you really understand at all, that 
I am trying to be happy and keep my self-respect?” 

She eyed me a moment strangely, then dropped her head. 

“We will never understand each other,” she said at last. 
“We won’t discuss things any more. It leads to nothing.” 

But Claire felt that she, too, must make an attempt to 
bring me to reason. She attacked me on the subject of 
Genevieve. There she was clever. Was I not neglecting 
my child a little? No, I replied I was not. I was out so 
much, I seemed to take so little interest in her education. 
At this I flared up. 

“Her education, my dear, is as you know, not in my hands. 
Her father has made clear his wishes on that subject. Her 
mind is confided to the keeping of Monseigneur de Grimont 
and you know what he is doing with it better than I do. 
What with her prayers, her masses and her confessions, 
her priestly tutors who instructed her in Latin and Greek, 
Italian and Spanish, and the good sisters who teach her to 
embroider altar pieces and to believe every ridiculous mira¬ 
cle in the lives of the saints, such healthy heathen interests 
as I can cultivate in her little ecstatic soul have small chance 
of flourishing.” 

“But Jane, surely she has her dancing, her riding, her 
music ?” 

“Yes, of course, she has everything, everything, but no 
time for her mother. Her days are as full as a time table. 
Try as I may, I can never get more than an hour a day with 
her. How then am I to make her my life’s occupation? 
That’s what you meant, wasn’t it? You said I neglected 
her.” 

“What I meant was that you seem to have forgotten us all, 


2$6 Jane—Our Stranger 

Genevieve included, and to have forgotten what we and 
therefore what she must stand for in society.” 

“On the contrary.” 

“You mean—?” 

“I mean that I constantly think of it, but perhaps not just 
as you do.” 

“Well, if you want your daughter to take Clementine as a 
pattern.” 

“I don’t,” and then added with deliberate wickedness, “I 
wouldn’t have poor little Jinny attempt anything so impos¬ 
sible.” 

“You admire her so much?” 

“I do.” 

“But she’s grotesque. She goes in for politicians and for 
journalists.” 

“I adore her.” 

“She’s shameless—her affairs—” 

I cut her short. “I know nothing about her affairs. 
What I know is that she has a generous soul, a warm heart 
and the most brilliant mind in Paris. No other woman in 
Paris can touch her for brains.” 

Claire lifted her eyebrows. I saw that she washed her 
hands of me. At the moment I was glad of it. As for 
Clementine, she cared nothing for what Claire or any one 
else thought of her. She was a law unto herself. Her love 
affairs, of which I knew more than I admitted, were as 
necessary to her as her meals. She must have food, and she 
attached no great importance to it. An artistic find, an 
amusing trip or an exciting debate in the Chamber of Depu¬ 
ties, would make her forget with equal ease her lunch or a 
sentimental rendezvous. Her relations with men didn’t seem 
to me to be any of my business. There was a certain reck¬ 
lessness there that I didn’t understand. I left it at that. It 
was Fan who told me about Clementine’s marriage. 

“My dear, her husband had unnatural tastes. He kicked 
her downstairs a month after the wedding. She can never 
have any children, and she hasn’t spoken to him since. Also, 


Jane—Our Stranger 257 

she is said to have said that she would never again have any¬ 
thing to do with a man of her own world. If she did, well, 
she has kept her word. Her mother stopped her getting 
, her marriage annulled. Clementine never got over that. 
She’s at war with the whole tribe of her relations, but of 
course she can’t cut loose from them for she hasn’t a son, 
and anyhow one doesn’t in France. So her revenge is to do 
just those things that most irritate them. They wouldn’t 
mind a bit how many lovers she had if she would choose 
them from her own class, and preserve the usual appear¬ 
ances. What they can’t bear is her going about with men 
whose fathers made boots or sold pigs. And in justice to 
them you should remember that these men’s grandfathers 
cut of! their own grandfather’s heads.” 

“They prefer, I suppose, a person like Bianca.” 

“Of course, a million times.” 

“It’s nothing to Clementine’s credit then that she’s a true 
friend and incapable of grabbing a man from another 
woman.” 

“No, as long as she dresses like a futurist picture, and 
carries paper bags through the streets and dines with Ludo- 
vic at Voisin’s, she’s a horrid thorn in their sides.” 

“Well, I’m sorry, because you know I don’t propose to 
stop going about with her.” 

“Lord, no, why should you? You certainly deserve a bit 
of fun. Come to the Mouse Trap tomorrow night. We’ve 
a supper party after the Russian Ballet.” 

But I knew what that meant, a troup of theatrical people, 
and every one drunk by morning, so I declined. I saw a 
good deal of Fan these days, but she had certain friends I 
couldn’t see. It didn’t amuse me to watch women get tipsy. 
Those Montmartre parties depressed me horribly. And I 
felt sure of Clementine and her band on this point. It was 
just one of the admirable things about them that they could 
be so daringly gay and never verge on the rowdy. I had 
seen her administer a snub to a hiccoughing youth. She 
could be terrible when she was displeased, and whatever one 


258 Jane—Our Stranger 

said of her, for that matter whatever she herself felt, no one 
could get away from the fact that she was as proud a lady as 
any in France, and perfectly conscious of her privilege of 
caste. It was just this consciousness of her lineage, I im¬ 
agined, that gave her such a sense of security. She knew 
that she could do anything she chose and be none the less 
privileged for it, and actually none the worse. If she touched 
pitch she knew it wouldn’t stick to her fingers. If she 
dipped into Bohemia, she did so knowing that she could never 
be said to belong there. There was always behind her a 
solid phalanx of relatives who would never disown her how¬ 
ever much they disapproved. Always in her maddest es¬ 
capades there were the towers of the family castle looming 
behind her. They cast an august shadow. She might dress 
like an artist’s model, never would she be taken for one. 
She was safe, perfectly safe and she knew it, and so did 
every one else. 

But with me, as Aunt Clothilde pointed out, it was differ¬ 
ent. 

“There’s nothing to prove what you are but the way you 
behave, my poor Jane. If Clem took it into her head to play 
at being a barmaid, the de Joignys and all the rest of them 
would wring their hands and call it a scandalous idiocy, but 
if you did the same thing they’d say, ‘Of course, it’s quite 
natural, she probably was a barmaid in her own country,’ 
and they wouldn’t wring their hands at all, they’d be mightily 
pleased.” 

“So they think my associating with Ludovic is proof of a 
low mind?” 

“Well, what do you find in that old bourgeois?” 

“I find a gold mine.” 

“A gold mine of what?” 

“Information, ideas.” 

“Humph!” 

“But it’s true, Aunt, he is educating me. He gives me 
books, philosophy, history, all sorts of books, then we dis¬ 
cuss them.” 


Jane—Our Stranger 259 

"Just like going to school, eh?” 

"Very much like that.” 

"And it doesn’t bore you?” 

"On the contrary.” 

"Well, no one will ever believe you. If Philibert comes 
back, he certainly won’t.” 

She broke off and looked at me closely. 

"Ah ha, you still care for him, then?” 

"No, no, how could I, I mean how could he? It’s impos¬ 
sible that he should return now, surely.” 

A week later I found a note from him on my breakfast 
tray, announcing his return. He was installed in his own 
rooms in the west wing of the house, and he would "present 
his duties” at the hour I chose to name. And the post that 
same morning brought me a letter from Bianca. It said— 

"If you blame me for taking away your husband, it is 
stupid of you. I did you a great service in doing so. Per¬ 
haps that was why I did it. I can think of no other reason. 
For myself I regret it, but not for you. I envy you. Bi¬ 
anca.” 

My fingers trembled as I read this strange epistle, and I 
felt cold. Actually—it seemed as if the room had gone cold 
as ice. 


VI 


I T seemed at first as if Philibert’s return were going to 
make very little difference to me. For some weeks I 
was scarcely aware of his presence in the house. There 
was plenty of room for us to live there without running into 
each other. When we did meet at the front door or on. the 
stairs, his manner was marked by just that formal courtesy 
that was the usual sign of .deference from a man of his 
world towards his wife. To the servants, there was always 
one or two present at such encounters; there could have been 
visible no flaw in his armour, nor in mine. 

Our first meeting had been brief. Whatever his intention 
in seeking me out in my boudoir, it took him not more than 
five minutes to find out that there was nothing to be gained 
by a prolonged conversation, and on the whole, nothing to 
be feared from me, did he but leave me alone, but I imagined 
that I read upon his face more disappointment than relief. 
He had not been afraid, perhaps just a little uneasy, but he 
had been curious. He had expected something, and as he 
left me the expression of his back and the vague fumbling 
of his hand in the tail pocket of his coat, gave me the im¬ 
pression that whatever it was he had wanted, he was going 
away without it. This impression, however, was fleeting, a 
deeper and more painful one remained, and kept me a long 
time idle at my desk. He was changed in a way that for 
some subtle inexplicable reason had made me ashamed to 
look at him. There was in his pallid puffy face, in the sag 
of his shoulders and the crook of his knees, something that 
I did not want to understand, something that he had no 
right to show me. Inside his immaculate clothes he was 
shrivelled to half his size. His wonderful padded coat sat 

260 


Jane—Our Stranger 261 

on him as if on a lifeless and flaccid dummy out of which 
had escaped a good deal of the sawdust stuffing. Bianca 
had done with him. She had worn him out. He looked 
old. His eccentric elegance no longer became him. It was 
as unsuccessful as a plastered make-up on the face of an 
old woman. That was the sharpest impression of all, he 
looked a failure. I wondered that he had the courage to 
show himself, not to me but to Paris, where he had always 
walked with such impudent assurance. His showing him¬ 
self to me seemed to me not half so daring. It seemed to me 
to prove once more and finally his complete contempt for 
my opinion. 

I went on with my life. If I found that the savour had 
gone out of it, I did not admit this all at once to myself. 
The situation didn’t bear thinking about. If one thought 
about it one would be likely to find it quite extraordinary 
enough to upset one’s mentality, and I proposed not to be 
upset by it, and Philibert, apparently, with a certain exercise 
of tact that reminded one of a burglar arranging the furni¬ 
ture and putting out the lights after ransacking a room, 
made things as easy for me as he could, by, as I say, keep¬ 
ing out of my sight. I soon found, however, that he wasn’t 
keeping out of other people’s. On the contrary, I began to 
be conscious of him moving about near me among his 
friends. It was really rather funny. Only at home under 
the roof that housed us both, was I quite free from him. 
In other people’s houses I was constantly meeting his 
shadow. He had either been there, or was coming, occasion¬ 
ally I was certain, that he had but just taken his departure 
as I came in. Something of him remained in the room. I 
caught myself looking about for his hat, and the faces of 
my acquaintances betrayed varying shades of discomfiture or 
amusement. Mostly I gathered as time went on, was their 
feeling one of amusement. Paris had not been at all 
squeamish in welcoming Philibert, and it found our con¬ 
tinued chasse-croise rather ridiculous. But with its very 
special adaptibility and its extraordinary flair for situations, 


262 Jane—Our Stranger 

it continued to be tolerant of my evident absurd wish not to 
be coupled with my husband, and did not ask us out to¬ 
gether. 

Aunt Clothilde, sitting enthroned like some comic Juno 
above the social earth, put an end to this. As was her 
habit she sent for me and barged into the subject in hand. 

“Now then, Jane, this sort of thing must stop.” 

“What sort of thing, Aunt?” 

“You and Philibert playing hide and seek all over Paris 
like a couple of silly children. Don’t pretend you don’t 
understand. You chose your ‘parti’ long ago when you 
didn’t insist upon a separation, so now you must go through 
with it. Nothing is so stupid as doing things half way. 
You’ve ignored his behaviour. You’ve not bolted the door 
in his face, and to all appearances you’re a reunited couple.” 

I tried to interrupt. 

“Don’t interrupt me. I don’t care, and nobody cares 
what goes on between you and Philibert in your private 
apartments. Whether you’re nasty or affectionate is no¬ 
body’s business but your own, but as regards society, so¬ 
ciety expects people in it to behave in a certain way, and to 
make things easy and agreeable and smooth. That’s its 
main object, its only raison d’etre. We people who think 
ourselves something are nothing if we’re not well bred, that 
is, if we don’t know how to help other people to keep up 
the pretence that every one is happy, that life is harmonious 
and that there’s nothing dreadful under the sun. Society, 
French society, is very intolerant of bad manners, not as 
you know of anything else. It is exclusive with this ob¬ 
ject and adamant on this point. It let you in, now it expects 
you to behave. You’ve enjoyed its favour, you owe it 
something in return. What a bore to lecture you like a 
school-mistress, but there you are. I’m going to give a 
dinner and you and Philibert are both to come, and that will 
be the end of this nonsense.” 

And of course I did as she said. 

And again your mother’s manner to me conveyed a sense 


Jane—Our Stranger 263 

of my action having made a difference, but this time an 
enormously happy difference. She beamed, she was more 
affectionate than she had ever been. She called me “Ma 
chere petite” “Ma fille aimee” Drawing me down to her 
with her delicate blue-veined hand, she would press her lips 
to one of my cheeks then the other, lingeringly, and with a 
pathetic trembling pressure, and look from me to Philibert 
with happy watery eyes in which was no scrutiny or ques¬ 
tioning. She was growing old. Something of her fine 
discernment was gone. She was no longer curious to know 
what lay behind appearances. It was enough for her to 
have recovered her son and been spared the sight of his 
ruin. Like a child she clung to Philibert. I admit that 
his manner to her was very charming. He went to see her, 
I believe, every day. 

Claire did not seem so pleased with our renewed family 
life that resembled so curiously the life we had lived round 
your mother five years before. Her smile was bitter, her 
tongue caustic, but she looked so ill, that I put her temper 
down to bad health. It was, strangely enough, Philibert 
who explained to me, driving home from his mother’s one 
Sunday afternoon. 

“You mustn’t mind Claire,” he began. “She is in 
trouble.” 

“I don’t. I can see she is in wretched health.” 

“Her health is the result, not the cause, of her unhappi¬ 
ness.” 

“Oh?” 

“Her husband has fallen into the hands of a scheming 
woman who wants to marry him. He has threatened Claire 
with a divorce.” 

I was taken aback. I stammered. For an instant I 
wanted to laugh, but Claire’s haggard face was after all 
nothing to laugh at. I remarked mildly; “But I thought 
that in your world one didn’t divorce?” 

“He’s not of our world, never was, never will be. Be¬ 
sides, it bores him, he’s had enough of us.” 


Jane—Our Stranger 


264 

“I see.” 

“He’s had too many snubs. We’ve been stupid. That 
affair of the Jockey Club rankles.” 

“You mean that if you had taken him into the Jockey 
Club ten years ago he wouldn’t want to divorce your sister 
now.” 

“Quite possibly. It would have involved him in other 
things, given him something to live up to. As it is, he has, 
as you know, gone in for politics.” 

“No, I didn’t know. I never hear him mentioned. I’m 
very sorry if Claire is unhappy about it.” 

“She is, terribly.” 

“But she hates him.” 

“Not quite that. In any case the disgrace would kill her. 
She has always been a retiring protected creature. The 
publicity would be peculiarly awful for her.” 

I knew that what he said was true, but he had more 
to say, and he stammered over it. 

“We thought that you, Jane, might do something.” 

I was startled. “Do something?” 

“Yes, to help, to persuade the man not to.” 

“But I scarcely know him.” 

“He has a great respect for you.” 

“For me? What nonsense.” I looked at him sharply. 
“What do you mean, Philibert?” 

His pale blue eyes turned from mine to the Sunday pag¬ 
eant of the Champs Elysees. 

“He wants a place in the Government. He would be 
greatly influenced by political considerations, a prospect of 
success. Your friend Ludovic could do something there.” 

“You mean that you want me to ask Ludovic to ask the 
Premier to give your brother-in-law a place in the Cabinet 
on condition he doesn’t bring divorce proceedings?” 

“It needn’t be a big place, you know. An under-secre¬ 
taryship would do.” The car drew up, came to a stop. 
“You’d better talk to Blaise about it, before you decide to 
leave Claire in the lurch.” 


Jane— Our Stranger 265 

But you showed a curious reluctance to discuss the 
question and referred me to Clementine. I found her in 
the disused stables behind her house where she had fitted 
up a studio. She was in a linen overall, her arms smeared 
with clay, a patch of it on the tip of her tilted nose, her hair 
screwed untidily on top of her ugly attractive head. She 
pointed out a clean spot on a packing case and after light¬ 
ing a cigarette I sat down there. 

“I’ve come about Claire.” 

“I know.” Her face twinkled. She gave a laugh and 
taking up a handful of wet clay slapped it on the side of the 
gargoylish head that she was modelling. 

“Why won’t Blaize talk to me about it ?” 

“He doesn’t like their using you in the matter. He has 
delicacies of feeling.” 

“I don’t quite see. He adores his sister.” 

“Of course.” 

“And is very unhappy about her, as they all are.” 

“Naturally.” 

I pondered. “After all, I belong to the family.” 

“Quite so, whether you like it or not.” She ducked about 
scraping and smoothing with flexible thumb. 

“But I’m fond of them.” 

“Of Claire?” 

“Yes.” 

“People are.” 

“You sound very dry.” 

“She gave a poke to her ugly old man’s protruding eye. 

“Mon dieu, I’m not too fond of your family, as you well 
know. They bore me. I was brought up with Claire. We 
know each other.” 

“You don’t like her.” 

“She is uninteresting, no courage, no character.” 

“She has put up with a great deal.” 

“Has she? She liked her husband’s money, you know, 
and he’s not a bad sort, really, merely vulgar, quite good- 
natured.” 


266 Jane—Our Stranger 

“She loves her children,” I said weakly. At that Clemen- 
tine looked round quickly. 

“Do you call that a virtue?” she asked. 

I stammered. “I don’t know, I suppose so. It seems to 
me human.” 

“Well, my dear, when humanity has nothing more to 
recommend it than the fact that it cares for its young, I 
shall be ready to depart to another planet.” She sat down 
on a high stool, one knee over the. other, a foot hung down, 
dangling a shabby shoe. Her face was full of merriment. 
She chuckled. Her eyes danced. She gave me, as she al¬ 
ways did, the impression of containing in herself an im¬ 
mense fund of interest and gladness and of finding life 
much to her taste. 

“You mustn’t destroy my belief in my love for my child,” 
I said, half laughingly. 

“Your belief in it?” She wondered. 

“Yes, in its being—worth something.” 

“To which one?” 

“To us both.” 

She puffed at her cigarette. “If I had had a child I 
should have loved it terribly, and stupidly,” she said seri¬ 
ously. “I should probably have been worse than any of 
you. Maternity is a blinding, devouring passion, is it not? 
I don’t know, but so I imagine. A mother’s love for her 
child, what is there more admirable in that than in any 
other fact of nature? Only when it is strong, so terribly 
strong as to become wise and unselfish is it interesting. 
Even then, no, it is not interesting, it is only natural and 
necessary, and often, very often, it is a curse to the chil¬ 
dren.” Her face had gone dark and intense. She jumped 
down from her stool, gave herself a shake, laughed, turned 
to her work—“No, your mother-women are dreadful. I 
prefer those who love men. Sexual passion is good for 
the feminine soul. It makes us intelligent. Tell me, is it 
true that in America sensuality is considered a bad thing?” 

“Yes. We—they—admire chastity, purity.” 


267 


Jane—Our Stranger 

“How do you mean—purity ?” 

“One man for one woman, love consecrated by marriage. ,, 

“All one's life?” 

“Yes.” 

“How strange. Love, you say, consecrated by marriage. 
How very funny. You mean then seriously, not just 
social humbug? In their hearts do intelligent women, 
women like yourself, feel love, love as the interest and 
savour of life, coming unexpectedly, perhaps often, to be 
a bad thing?” 

“Many do.” 

“And you—what do you think?” 

“I? Oh, for me, I can’t generalize about it. I have no 
ideas on the subject.” 

“I see.” 

She was silent a while. I watched her clever thumbs 
pressing and smoothing the soft clay. She was no sculptor, 
but the head she was modelling had a mischievous ugliness. 
Though badly done, it expressed something. Watching 
her I realized again her immense capability, her command of 
herself, her understanding of the elements of life. What 
was she thinking of now, her sensitive witty face blinking 
sleepily with half-closed eyes like a cat’s? Inwardly I felt 
that she was faintly smiling at some pleasant memory or 
prospect. She was neither young nor beautiful. Her wiry 
little person suggested nothing voluptuous or alluring. She 
was dry and spare and untidy, yet her success with men was 
unequalled. Impossible to imagine her in an attitude of 
amorous tenderness, yet men adored her. And her lovers 
remained her friends. She puzzled me. There was 
something here that I would never understand. The 
high game of sex as a life occupation of absorbing in¬ 
terest and endless ramifications, a gallant and dangerous 
sport at which one became a recognized expert, in some such 
way I felt that she looked at it. As an Englishwoman gives 
herself up to hunting, I reflected, and exults in knowing her¬ 
self to be a hard rider, just so Clementine would go at the 


268 Jane—Our Stranger 

biggest jumps, keep in the first field. Riding to hounds or 
playing the daring game of love, the same sporting mentality, 
the same ecstatic sense of life, all our faculties sharpened 
by danger. Why not? Clementine was sane, healthy, full 
of zest and delight. Impossible to think of her in terms of 
maudlin sentimentality or sordid secret pleasures. And yet 
for myself, I felt a loathing of men, a disgust at the vaguest 
image of the contacts of sex. It was very puzzling. There 
must be some deep racial difference between us, or some 
tenacious effect of my upbringing that held me in a vice, or 
was it only that Philibert had poisoned for me the sources 
of all emotion? 

I moved about the dirty studio, brought back my mind to 
the subject I had come to discuss. “We have forgotten 
about Claire, haven’t we?” 

“Well, yes, what of Claire?” She yawned. 

“Philibert says that Ludovic could arrange it.” 

“No doubt he could. The President of the Council is 
you know his greatest friend.” 

“Yes, I know, but surely giving away secretaryships—” 

“Oh, la la! Why not? Don’t worry about that. Ma¬ 
dame de Joigny’s son-in-law will make quite a respectable 
under-secretary as far as that goes. I only wonder he’s 
not got what he wanted long ago.” 

“What shall I do then?” 

She looked at me, her head on one side, screwing up her 
clever mischievous eyes. 

“That, my dear, depends entirely on what you want to 
do.” 

“Do you think Ludovic would mind my approaching him 
on such a subject?” 

She laughed. “Do you?” 

“No, I don’t. I should put it quite brutally, he would 
only have to say no.” 

“Quite so.” She continued to watch me with her funny 
intelligent grin. 


Jane—Our Stranger 269 

“And that wouldn’t spoil our friendship, would it?” I 
asked again. 

“No, I should say not, certainly not.” She laughed again 
and somehow, frank as was that bubbling sound, I didn’t 
like it coming in at that moment. 

“Why do you laugh?” I asked, looking at her keenly. 

Her face grew gradually grave, her eyes opened. We 
stared at each other and in hers I saw a light, a flash, some¬ 
thing keen and swift and bright that made me warm to her, 
value her, exult in her friendship. 

“Vous etes—vous etes —” she turned it oflf, waving a 
handful of clay. “Vous etes admirable But I didn’t 
understand then, only long after. I wonder what Claire 
would say if she knew that her fate hung on the thread of 
Clementine’s charity? For Clementine saw it all, saw quite 
clearly her opportunity for revenge. She had only to sug¬ 
gest what they, unknown to me, were all thinking, namely 
-that Ludovic, for the simplest of reasons, would never re¬ 
fuse me anything, and their whole little scheme would be 
undone. But she didn’t suggest it. There was nothing 
spiteful in Clementine. 

So I went to him and told him the whole thing quite 
bluntly, and he, without any fuss or without giving me any 
feeling of doing me a favour, said that of course he would 
put in a word with the Premier. They, he and the Pre¬ 
mier, were going to the country together for a few days. 
They were going to see Ludovic’s mother in her little farm 
on the Loire. They would fish and sit in the garden. Per¬ 
haps over their fishing rods on the banks of the lazy, reedy 
river, something could be arranged. He then went on to 
tell me of his mother, who was very old, nearly eighty-five, 
and who would not come with him to Paris because of the 
noise. She was, he said, just a peasant woman, and had 
no interest in his career. But she sent him baskets of apples 
from her orchard and socks that she had knitted. She 
could not write. The cure kept him informed of her 


270 Jane—Our Stranger 

health. They had been very poor. As a child he had 
always been hungry and he and his mother had worked in 
the fields. Sometimes they had been so poor that they had 
had to beg for bread. His father, who had been of a differ¬ 
ent class, had done nothing for him. He had made his 
own way. The cure had taught him to read and write. 
His mother was content now. She had a cow and pigs and 
chickens, an apple orchard and a garden. But she could 
not accustom herself to having a servant in the house and 
did the cooking herself. He did not allude again to Claire’s 
husband, neither then nor later. In time, as you know, the 
matter was arranged, and I like to think that it was settled 
in that chaumiere where Ludovic’s little old mother in 
her white cap and coarse blue apron sat knitting, while the 
hens scratched and cackled beyond the farm door. There 
is something humorous to me in the fact that Claire’s luxuri¬ 
ous home was secured to her in that place of poverty and 
courage and contentment. 

In the meantime Philibert had recovered his health and 
his looks. His doctor and his masseur and his hairdresser 
and his tailor had in six months restored to him a very 
good substitute for youth. He had gone at the business 
methodically and with the utmost seriousness. Seeing as 
little of him as possible at home, I nevertheless was aware 
of what was going on. He lived by a strict regime. His 
rubber came every morning at eight o’clock, his fencing 
master at nine. At ten he dressed. At eleven he walked 
or rode in the bois. Faithfully he stuck to the diet his 
doctor had ordered for him. He drank only the lightest 
wine. He gave up smoking. His hand no longer shook. 
His face was smooth and rosy, he had put on weight, he 
walked with his old springy impudence. He looked almost 
the same, almost, but not quite. No beauty doctor on earth 
could wipe away from his face the mark Bianca had put 
there. The droop of the eye-lids, the sag of the lower lip, 
gave him away. To the crowd he might seem the same 
Philibert, the leader of fashion, the joyous comedian, the 


Jane—Our Stranger 271 

perenially young, but not to me, and not to himself. We 
both knew that he was an old man now, and this fact 
formed a sort of bond between us, a cold, grim, precise 
understanding that linked us inevitably together. And for 
a time I didn’t quite hate this because I felt secure, I felt 
that I had the upper hand. He was afraid of me, and in 
a curious way depended on me. He depended on me, not 
to give him away, not to let on to any one that he was, or 
had been, in danger of breaking up. His vanity thus kept 
him at my mercy, while another part of his brain found re¬ 
lief in the fact that I saw him as he was. Sometimes I 
caught a look in his eyes that seemed to say—“I really 
wouldn’t have the endurance to sustain this enormous bluff 
if I had to bluff you as well.” I never answered his look. 
I couldn’t bring myself to reach out to him in even the most 
impersonal way. All I could do was to remain there beside 
him, in public sharing his life, in private withdrawn, im¬ 
passive, stolid, non-committal, and do him no harm. 

And so it might have gone on indefinitely, the atmosphere 
of our house coldly harmonious, calm as an icy lake, had 
not Jinny introduced an element of hot, surging, dangerous 
feeling. 

He loved her, too. At first I wouldn’t believe it, but 
I was bound at last to admit that it was so. When I first 
began to notice the increasing attention he gave her I had 
thought that he was “up to something.” I suspected him 
to be playing the part of devoted father with motives that 
had to do with myself, and as I could not conceive of his 
wanting to make me like him, I imagined the reverse, that 
he wanted to make me jealous, and I set myself to conceal 
from him the fact that he had succeeded. I was terribly 
jealous, for whatever the meaning of his apparent feeling 
for her, there was no doubt of her affection for him. The 
child was obviously delighted to be with him. Repeatedly 
when I asked her if she would like to go with me for a 
drive, she would ask if “Papa” were coming too, and when 
I said no, her face woqld change from pleasure to a curi- 


272 Jane—Our Stranger 

ous expression of boredom that was like an absurd imitation 
of his own. She would turn away quickly and put out her 
hands to the empty room in a funny, hurting gesture of 
exasperation, then suddenly, feeling my disappointment, 
would assume a polite cheerfulness and say, with a quick, 
tactful insincerity that reminded me all too vividly of her 
grandmother, “It is a pity Papa cannot come, but of course, 
Mamma, I like best being with you alone.” And I would 
cry out in my heart, “My poor, precocious infant, where did 
you get such intuitions?”—but I knew where she got them. 

There was between them a very striking resemblance. I 
looked sometimes with horrid fascination from one to the 
other. She would come in with him, swinging to his hand, 
twirling about, clasping it in both hers, and laughing up in 
his face. Her light, exaggerated grace was his, also the 
fineness of her little features. No one would ever at first 
sight take her for my child, no one seeing them together 
could mistake her for his. They disengaged the same 
brightness, the same chilly, sparkling charm. How was it 
that in one it displeased me and in the other so tormentingly 
appealed? Why, I asked myself, did I not hate her too, 
since she so resembled her father? But the muttered ques¬ 
tion was answered only by an inaudible groan. I had given 
him all my love, and had now transferred it all to her, a 
stupid, elemental woman, I felt that I was destined to be 
their victim. Strange thoughts, you will say, for a mother 
to have about her child. Why not? I was afraid of her, 
far more afraid than I had ever been of him. In the days 
of his power over me I had been young, ignorant, insensi¬ 
tive; now I knew what I was capable of suffering, knew 
only too well what little Genevieve could do to me, did she 
take it into her head to become as like him as she looked. 

I tried to hide all this, but I felt that he saw. His manner 
changed. He was at once more attentive to me and more 
careless, less formal, more talkative, in a word more sure 
of himself. He took to dropping in on me in the evenings 
before dinner, bringing Genevieve with him and holding her 


Jane—Our Stranger 273 

beside him in the crook of his arm, while he unconcernedly 
chatted, and all the while her great shining brown eyes 
were fixed on me with their meaning lucidity. I was obliged 
to prevaricate, to seem pleased, to lay myself out in an elab¬ 
orate assumption of happy intimacy. 

One night she came running back alone after going with 
him to the door of his room, and threw her arms round my 
neck. I gathered her close. Her caresses were so rare 
that I held her, positively, in a breathless delight, with a 
sense of yearning tenderness so exquisite that it frightened 
me. “So sweet, so sweet,” I murmured to myself, strain¬ 
ing her to me. Then I heard her say intensely, “It’s not 
true, it’s not true, tell me it’s not true.” 

I lifted my face from her curls. 

“What is not true, my darling?” 

“That you and Papa don’t love each other.” She kept her 
face buried. I felt her heart beating against me, a frail 
little gusty heart beating painfully. The room round us 
was very still, too still, no sound in it, only the felt sound 
of our heart beats, and the clock ticking on the mantelpiece. 
I must speak, I must lie to her, and as the words left my 
lips I knew that they were involving me in endless decep¬ 
tions, in a long, long ghastly comedy, in countless humilia¬ 
tions. 

“No, darling, it’s not true.” 

Her little arms tightened round my neck. 

“They said—” she whispered. 

“Who said, my pet?” 

“Some ladies. I heard them talking. They said, they 
said you would never forgive him,.” I felt her body trem¬ 
bling, and I too trembled, and as I realized that I had thought 
her incapable of intense feeling I felt deeply ashamed. 
“What did they mean, Mamma, tell me, what did they 
mean ?” 

“Nothing, nothing.” I must have spoken harshly. “They 
were mistaken, they were speaking of some one else.” 

She lifted her face then and looked at me, her eyes were 


274 Jane—Our Stranger 

wide and accusing. “Oh, no, Mummy, they said yojur 
names, they said Jane and Philibert, your two names. It 
was at Aunt Claire’s. Dicky and I were just behind the 
door, and I pulled him away so he wouldn’t hear any more, 
but he only laughed at me and said, ‘Every one knows your 
parents detest each other’—in French, you know, 'Tout le 
monde salt que tes parents se detestent / and then I kicked 
him.” 

“Jinny!” 

“I only kicked him a little. It didn’t hurt. I wanted it 
to hurt, dreadfully.” 

“My child, my child.” 

“I know, Mummy, that it was very wicked. I told 
Father Anthony all about it at confession, and he looked 
so sad, so beautifully sad. I wept and wept. He told me 
to pray very hard to the Virgin to save me from angry 
passions, and I did, but I enjoyed being angry. I felt big 
and strong when I was angry, quite, quite different from 
ordinary, and I thought you would understand. Were you 
never angry when you were a little girl?” 

“Yes, darling, I was.” Her question had startled me. I 
was profoundly disturbed by this sudden revelation of 
her character. 

But again her little mobile face had changed. 

“You aren’t like that, are you, Mummy? You couldn’t 
be?” 

“Like what, my darling?” 

“Unforgiving.” Her eyes were on mine. 

“I hope not, Genevieve.” She flushed at my tone, but 
continued to look at me gravely and steadily. 

“I thought you might have been angry with Papa for 
leaving us for so long,” she said with an air of great wis¬ 
dom. “I was, but I forgave him at once.” I smiled. 

“You see,” she went on, “I couldn’t bear him to be un¬ 
happy, for I love him.” 

“I know, darling.” 

“And you love him, too?” 


275 


Jane—Our Stranger 

“Of course.” 

She heaved an immense sigh. 

“Then we are all happy.” 

“We are all happy,” I echoed. 

A minute later she was at the door, wafting me a gay 
little kiss. I had not been able to keep her. She was not 
more than ten years old at that time, but even then she was 
already the complete elusive creature of swift fleeting moods 
and superlatively lucid mind that she is today. 

And still I suspected Philibert of playing the part of ador¬ 
ing father in order to make me do what he wished. So 
without alluding to Jinny, never, in fact, daring to allude 
to her, I tried to bribe him. He had hinted occasionally 
about wanting to resume our old habits of entertaining, and 
his hint had shocked me. Such a farce had seemed alto¬ 
gether unnecessary. Now I gave in to him and the same 
old extravagant theatrical life began. To me it was incredi¬ 
bly boring and at times quite ghastly. There were moments 
when it was as if over the old sepulchre of our married life 
he had built an enormous and hideous altar to some obscene 
heathen deity, some depraved Bacchus before whom he and 
I giddily danced, with vine leaves in our hair. 

“But,” I argued, “this is what he likes, and if I help him 
do it he will have got from me all that he wants, he will leave 
Jinny alone. He will have less time for her and will forget 
about her.” Unfortunately all these social antics took up 
as much of my time as his. The result was that neither of 
us saw the child save in hurried snatches, and in that horri¬ 
ble house, now so constantly filled with people, with armies 
of servants, and streams of guests, I had a vision of her skip¬ 
ping about like a little white rabbit in a monstrous zoo. 
Poor Jinny, what a wretched mess we made of her childhood, 
Philibert and I, with our constant vigilant, yet inadequate, 
lying to -each other in her presence, and our ridiculous ab¬ 
sorption in the tawdry pageant of society. And yet we both 
loved her and were doing it, even he in his way, for her. 
He wanting her to have an incomparably brilliant position in 


276 Jane—Our Stranger 

the world, I wanting to keep him away from her, thinking 
in my jealous stupidity that she would belong more to me 
the more he belonged to the world. 

It was when she fell ill that I was at last convinced of 
his caring for her. She had pneumonia, you remember, and 
was very near death for three days. I can see Philibert 
now, sitting through the night by her bed, he on one side, I 
on the other, I can see his face as he watched her painful 
breathing, a face clammy with sweat, contracting suddenly 
in a curious grimace when she struggled for breath. He 
never touched her. He left that to me and the nurses. But 
he never once took his eyes off her swollen little face. I 
was deeply impressed by the sight of that fidgety, nervous 
man sitting so still, hour after hour, and I remember his sob¬ 
bing when the child’s breathing grew easier and the doctors 
said the crisis was past. Poor Philibert, with his arms 
thrown across the foot of Jinny’s bed and his head on them, 
sobbing like a child, I felt very sorry for him that night. 

But it was too late for Jinny’s illness to make any real 
difference in our relationship. We had gone too far, I 
knew him too well. All that I could do was add to my 
knowledge of him the fact that he loved his child and leave it 
at that. 


VII 


T HE years passed, crowded with incidents, colourful, 
varied, gay. I saw them going by, like gaudy 
pleasure boats, richly panoplied and filled with 
graceful merry-makers, floating down a sullen river. Some¬ 
times I seemed to be alone, watching them go by, sometimes, 
beyond them, a long way off, I heard a sound that was like 
the sound of waves breaking on a distant beach. 

You wince at what you feel to be my poor attempt at 
poetic imagery—I am not trying to be poetic, I am trying to 
express to you my experience, as precisely as possible. It 
was like that. In the middle of a crowded place, at the 
Opera where women in diamond tiaras nodded from padded 
cages, on the boulevards where a thousand motors like shin¬ 
ing beetles buzzed in and out of rows of clanging trams, in a 
drawing-room ringing with staccato voices, I would find 
myself, suddenly, listening to a sound that seemed to come 
from an immense distance; a faint far rhythmic roar that 
was audible to my spirit, and that I translated to myself in 
terms of the sea because it affected me that way, like a 
booming murmur, regular as the booming of waves. I knew 
what it was. 

I seemed at such times to see Patience Forbes, standing 
on the other side of the Atlantic, like some allegorical figure 
of faith, a gaunt weather-beaten old woman, her strong feet 
planted firmly on the shore, the wind whipping her black 
clothes about her, her brave old eyes looking out at me, un¬ 
der shielding hands, across that immense distance. 

The distance between us was growing greater. I no 
longer wrote to her every week. There seemed so little to 
say. I found a difficulty in telling her of my occupations 

277 


278 Jane—Our Stranger 

and amusements. When it came to describing to her the 
people I associated with, they appeared suddenly trivial and 
peculiar. There was no one about me, whom she could 
have understood. Clementine with her genius for amorous- 
adventure, Ludovic with his nihilistic philosophy, Felix the 
intellectual mischief-maker; when I wrote to her of these 
people, I found that I misrepresented them, made up for 
them colourless characters that did not exist and would not 
distress her. Her innocence cut her off from us. The re¬ 
cital of my life was like telling a story and leaving out the 
point. I gave it up, disgusted by my feeble insincerity, and 
limited my letters to news of Jinny and comments on public 
events. And she understood, or course, that I was keeping 
everything back. She was no fool. I can see now, when 
it is too late, what a mistake I made, and what a pity it was. 
Now that she is dead, I think of her sitting alone in the 
Grey House, waiting for my letters, opening them with old 
trembling fingers, reading the meagre artificial sentences; 
her face growing tired and grim at the meaningless words, 
then putting away the disappointing sheets of paper in the 
secretary by the door. I found them there, all of them af¬ 
terwards arranged in packets with laconic pencilled notes on 
their wrappers—“Jane doesn’t tell me much. She’s not 
happy.” “A bad winter for Jane, she’s taken to gambling; 
she says nothing of her husband.” “Jane was coming but 
can’t. I’m disappointed.” That note was made the sum¬ 
mer Fan died—I had determined to go to St. Mary’s Plains. 
Fan’s illness stopped me. 

I had been seeing very little of Fan. She had established 
herself in a flat near the £toile where she lived alone, but 
where her husband paid her an occasional visit. Ivanoff was 
pretty well done for in Paris. There had been a scene at 
the Travellers’ Club, and afterwards his old victims had re¬ 
fused to play cards with him. So he had gone elsewhere. 
Men like Ivanoff can always pick up a living at Monte 
Carlo. He spent most of his time there, but when he came 
back, Fan always took him in. I never saw him on these 


Jane— Our Stranger 279 

occasions, nor apparently did any one else, but Fan would 
announce his arrival bluntly, and with a sort of defiant 
bravado, would put off her dinners and lunches to be with 
him. 

She lived from hand to mouth. People who accused her 
of accepting his ill-gotten gains were wide of the mark. 
Ivanoff contributed nothing to Fan’s keep. It was the other 
way round. He came back to her when he was on the rocks, 
came back to beg from her and to recuperate. Once she said 
to me, “Ivan’s been asleep for thirty-six hours on the sofa 
in the drawing-room. I swear to you it’s true. He has only 
waked up twice to eat a sandwich and have a drink.” 

But when I asked why she put up with him, she flung off 
with a laugh, and—“God only knows.” 

She lived from hand to mouth in a state of extravagant 
luxury. Her stepfather had died, leaving her four thou¬ 
sand dollars a year, that gave her twenty thousand francs 
before the war. One would have said that she spent at the 
least five times as much, but she didn’t. She had resources, 
and little arrangements that made it unnecessary for her to 
pay for a good many things; and she earned a good deal. 
Her reputation as one of the smartest women in Paris, and 
her popularity, represented her capital, a very considerable 
sum. New and ambitious dressmaking houses clothed her 
for nothing, and in return she brought them the clientele 
they wanted. She had a standing account at certain fash¬ 
ionable restaurants, where she was allowed to lunch for five 
francs and dine for ten, and where to “pay back” she was 
the centre of many a cosmopolitan dinner party. For ready 
cash she wrote social notes in a fashion paper and occa¬ 
sionally launched a South American millionaire in society. 
Every one knew about all this; no one minded. She never 
gave any one away or presumed on her friendships and her 
frankness about her own affairs which was dry and desperate 
and funny disarmed criticism, 

“My dear,” she said one day to Claire over the tea table, 
“I’ve had a letter from Buenos Aires from a man who offers 


280 Jane—Our Stranger 

me forty thousand francs if I’ll take his wife about next 
spring, and a five thousand franc tip extra, each time she 
dines at an embassy. Isn’t it a perfect scream? I wrote 
back asking for a photo of the wife. It came yesterday. 
I’ve turned down the offer.” 

She borrowed from no one and accepted no gifts of 
money from her friends, men or women, and I take the 
last to be the more to her credit because half the people in 
her world assumed that she did and the other half wouldn’t 
have blamed her if she had done so. Virtues, that you all 
held so lightly, have at least a relative value. Fan was in¬ 
curably extravagant; she adored luxury, and I consider that 
her having married a poor man, and having refused to pro¬ 
cure for herself in a manner so accepted by her world, the 
ease and comfort she craved, proves her to have been an 
interesting person. I see that you don’t believe what I say, 
but I know that it is true. Men did not pay her dress¬ 
maker’s bills. As for her little motor brougham that created 
so much comment, she bought that after an extremely lucky 
venture in rubber. She gambled on the “Bourse” of 
course. Old Beaudoin the banker gave her tips. Sometimes 
he invested her money for her. She would give him a few 
thousand francs and a month or two later he would per¬ 
haps sends her back twice the sum, but it is not exact to 
say that he always arranged to double her investment. And 
if he did take her wretched pennies and speculate with them 
and pretend that he had won when he lost, what harm did 
that do him with all his millions? It was all by way of re¬ 
payment anyhow. Fan had got him and his fat wife asked 
to a lot of nice houses. He owed her far more than he ever 
paid. And when she crowned her services to him by mak¬ 
ing his daughter’s marriage, surely she had earned the cheque 
he sent her or the block of shares, whichever it was. 

To have a good time, to be happy, a more sentimental 
woman would have put it, that was her idea. Who of us 
all had a better, or a different one ? Weren’t we all looking 
for happiness, always? 


Jane—Our Stranger 281 

Once I saw a street arab playing in the dirt with bits of 
mica, constantly threatened in his game by horses’ hoofs, 
wagon wheels, policemen and hooligans. Fan reminds me 
of him. I remember his tiny eager hungry grimy face, in¬ 
tent on his game. Fan was like him, I watched her playing 
with bits of worthless brightness in the crowded muddy 
streets of life, jostled, buffeted, knocked about, a little 
rickety gutter snipe, fighting for the right to play, that is 
the way I see her. It had a beauty! you’ll admit that, I sup¬ 
pose. 

But we quarrelled. I bored her. She didn’t like having 
any one about who couldn’t keep up the farce of treating 
her as the happiest of women, and she made fun of my tak¬ 
ing the intellectuals so seriously. 

When I wanted to see her I had to go to her flat where 
luxury and poverty and dissipation and folly were mingled 
together in an unhealthy confusion. It was a curious place, 
very bare and new and totally lacking in the usual necessities 
of housekeeping, such as cupboards and carpets, table linen 
and blankets, but there were flaming silks thrown about, and 
a good many books and heaps of soft brilliant cushions. A 
grand piano stood in the empty drawing-room on a bare 
polished floor. The dining room table held always a tray 
of syphons and bottles. There might be no food, there were 
always cocktails and ragtime tunes to dance to. Some¬ 
times the electric light was cut off because the bill wasn’t 
paid, but there was a supply of candles for such emergencies, 
and if creditors were too pressing, Fan would take to her bed 
and lie under her cobwebby lace coverlet on a pile of white 
downy pillows all frills and ribbons, smoking endless ciga¬ 
rettes while weary tradesmen rang the door bell, and her 
friends sat about on the foot of the old lacquer bed telling 
each other questionable stories, and going off into muffled 
shrieks of laughter. 

Her friends were many and various. Among them were 
people like Claire and Clementine and the wife of the Italian 
Ambassador, but her own small particular set, the group 


282 Jane—Our Stranger 

that she went about with most, had its special stamp. 

A cosmopolitan lot who had seen better days, and were 
keeping their heads up, by grit and bluff; they were I sup¬ 
pose the fastest set in Paris. The men didn’t interest me, 
but the women did, rather. There was something hard and 
dependable about them that I liked. They bluffed the world 
but not each other. Their talk was terse and to the point, 
their language coarse and brutal. They made no gestures 
and seemed always to be looking very straight at some 
definite invisible thing that occupied their cold attention. It 
may have been the ugliness of life that they were looking at. 
If so, it didn’t make them wince. It may have been the 
past, if so it didn’t make them shudder or creep. They 
wasted no time in remorse or regret. 

At times they reminded me of tight-rope walkers crossing 
a dizzy abyss. There was something tense and daring about 
their stillness, as if a chasm yawned under them. No doubt 
it did, but it was not their worldly position that was precari¬ 
ous, it was their actual hold on life. They would go on with 
their old titles and ruined fortunes leading the dance till 
they dropped, but they might drop any time. People in 
their entourage did, they were accustomed to violence. One 
had had a lover who called her up one morning and shot 
himself while she listened over the telephone. Another had 
tried twice to kill herself. Most of them drank and took 
drugs. Their hard glittering eyes gave out a glare of ex¬ 
perience, but their faces were cold, calm, non-commital, and 
if they were worried by the caddishness of the men they 
loved, by debts and the torments of passion, they gave no 
sign and held together and helped each other. For damned 
souls, they made a good show, and I admired them. 

They thought me a fool, however, and made a hedge 
around Fan, shutting her off from me. 

One morning I rushed round to her flat on an impulse. I 
had had no message from her but a curious feeling of nerv¬ 
ousness had bothered me in the night. Some one had men- 


Jane—Our Stranger 283 

tioned Ivanoff at a dinner table. I had heard the words— 
“wife-beater”—“card-sharper.” 

I found things at the flat in an indescribable state of dis¬ 
order. 

The drawing-room was strewn with the remains of supper. 
The table had not been cleared. There were broken glasses 
on the floor, empty champagne bottles about; a puddle of 
wine, some one had spilled a bottle of Burgundy. The cook 
opened the door for me. The manservant and Fan’s maid 
had decamped with the silver leaving word that they had 
taken it in payment of their two years’ wages. A bailiff 
was sitting on the sofa. Fan was lying in her room in the 
dark with a wet towel round her head. She said “Oh, 
hell!” as I came in and turned her back on me. The room 
had a curious sickly odour, some drug she had been taking, 
I suppose. Her clothes lay in a heap in the middle of the 
floor. The dress was torn, the stockings soiled and stained. 
I felt sick at my stomach. Fan gave a groan. 

“For God’s sake, Jane, go away; I’ve got the most ghastly 
headache.” 

All I could do was settle with the bailiff and help the 
cook clear up the mess. Fan scarcely spoke all the morning. 
The telephone kept ringing. 

“Tell them I’m ill. Tell them to go to the devil,” she 
called out. She lay there in a dripping perspiration, the 
sheets clinging to her thin body. She looked like a corpse 
fished out of the Seine. Suddenly she sprang up. “Good 
heavens! what time is it? I’m lunching at the Ritz with 
the Maharajah’s crowd at twelve thirty.” 

She sat with her feet dangling over the side of the bed 
holding her head in her hands. “My head’s bursting—my 
head’s bursting. Get me a blue bottle off the shelf in the 
bath room—six drops—no ten—I’ll take ten. It’s wonder¬ 
ful stuff—wonderful! I’ll be alright. You’re an angel. 
She talked in a kind of singing moan, a despairing half¬ 
crazy chant. “You’re an angel, Jane—you’re too good for 


284 Jane—Our Stranger 

this world. I’ll never be able to pay you. How much did 
you give that man ? Oh God! My head! I wish you 
hadn’t—leave me alone now. I must get dressed. Those 
Indians won’t know I’m half under. I’ll be all right if I 
can find my things. Go along—no—no—I don’t want any 
more help. Ivanofif was here last night; he went off at three 
this morning. I don’t know where he’s gone; they played 
chemmy. He won fifty thousand francs from that boy 
of Adela’s—that baby. I made a scene; I made him give it 
back. He knocked me down afterwards. He won’t come 
here again. Anyway he’s gone for good this time. If you 
ever speak to me of this, I’ll go mad. Leave me alone now. 
You won’t tell me what you paid that man, but I hate you to 
pity me, and you’re an angel—you’d no right to interfere. 
Do for heaven’s sake leave me alone now. God! what a 
world!” She tottered to her bathroom, trailing her lace 
nightgown after her. It hung by a ribbon to her bruised 
shoulder. She shut the door. I heard her turn on her bath. 
I went away. She avoided me for weeks after that. 

Bianca had come back to Paris; she had been, so gossip 
related it, travelling about Spain with a famous matador. 
Some people said she had joined his troupe disguised as a 
boy and had, more than once gone into the arena in a pink 
suit embroidered in silver and had planted once, the bander- 
illas, in a bull that had five minutes later run his horns 
through her paramour. I neither believed nor disbelieved 
the story. Jose had seen her in the Stand at Seville look¬ 
ing marvellous in a lace mantilla, a black dress high throated 
and a string of pearls which she flung to the popular hero. 
She had been wild with excitement, had stood up in her box 
and called out, and had torn her pearls from her neck with 
twenty thousand delerious Spaniards shouting round her, 
and Bombazelta III the Matador on his knee before her, be¬ 
side the carcase of his victim. Why shouldn’t she have gone 
a bit further? She liked danger. She could look the part. 
Actually, I did see a picture of her; three cornered hat, slim 
tight jacket and breeches, embroidered cape. It suited her, 


Jane—Our Stranger 285 

of course; she had the body of a boy, and Bombazelta III 
was a peculiarly striking man. His photograph was in all 
the Spanish papers. I found them lying about the library 
in Paris. Philibert must have sent for them. His nervous¬ 
ness during those days betrayed his interest. Though he 
never mentioned Bianca’s name, I knew that he was still in 
touch with her, that they wrote to each other, that he fol¬ 
lowed her movements. It did not surprise me, when during 
that summer he went for a week to Saint Sebastian, he 
called it Biarritz, but I knew where he was. It was Phili¬ 
bert’s behaviour on his return that made me think the stories 
of Bianca’s sensational caprice were true. Besides, it was 
just the kind of thing to amuse her for a time. 

I wasn’t interested. I didn’t want to know anything about 
her. All that I wanted was never to see her again. But she 
had no intention of leaving me alone. Her bullfighter dead, 
she came back to Paris. Paris is a small place. The com¬ 
munity in which we lived was crowded, cramped, intimate. 
Every one was constantly meeting every one else. Bianca 
stepped back into her place in it as if nothing had happened. 
Except for the fact that we were not asked to meet one an¬ 
other at lunch or dinner, one would have supposed that our 
acquaintances were unaware of our having any reason to 
dislike each other. The inevitable happened. A newly ap¬ 
pointed ambassador gave one of his first dinner parties and 
found no better way of making it a success than having 
us both present. We sat on either side of a royal guest. 
Across his meagre chest we eyed each other. Bianca looked 
much as usual, younger if anything. She had simplified her 
make-up. Her fine eyelashes now unplastered with black, 
curled wide from her great blue eyes that looked as innocent 
as forget-me-nots. Her face was smooth and white. The 
smallest thinnest line of carmine marked the curve of her 
lips. Her dress was a piece of black velvet wound round 
her white body that was immacuate and lovely. She had 
the freshness of a water lily, and moved through the salons, 
cool and serene in an attitude of still dreamy detachment, and 


286 Jane—Our Stranger 

her curious magnetism emanated from her like a perfume. 
She drifted up to me after dinner. 

“You must talk to me, Jane—” Her voice was cool 
and concise. “We have important things to say to each 
other.” 

“I have nothing to say.” 

She lifted her eyebrows. Her lips curved to a point. 
She gave a little sigh. 

“Why do you lie? You are tres en beaute, Jane—you 
are wonderful. Why do you lie?— You know you owe it 
all to me—” 

I turned my back on her but I felt her standing behind 
me, watching me, her eyes shining, her delicate nose palpi¬ 
tating faintly, her eyes reading me. She had no intention 
of leaving me alone. 

Our next meeting was at Madeleine’s. Madeleine was 
the woman who looked after my face. Bianca went to her 
too. I was sitting in front of the dressing-table, my head 
tied up in a towel, my face plastered with grease, when 
Bianca came in. She chattered and gossiped and held up 
the photograph of herself in the costume of the Spanish 
bull-ring. “I was distracting myself—” she laughed. “I 
had been bothered by some very curious ideas. You re¬ 
member our talk at the *Chateau des trois Maries' Well, 
that sort of thing. I thought the excitement would help. 
It did. I was within a yard of the bull when he died. Some 
of the blood splashed me. I didn’t like that.” 

I broke in saying that I didn’t believe a word of it. 

“Don’t you, Jane? Well, it’s no matter. It’s unim¬ 
portant. The important thing is that I’m sick to death of 
everything. Every one bores me. I find you are the only 
woman in Paris who is alive. I’ve been watching you—you 
are very extraordinary. You care for no one. You are 
self-sufficient. You have achieved the impossible.” 

All this time Madeleine was massaging my face and pre¬ 
tending not to be interested. I could say nothing. I boiled 
with rage, helpless, wrapped in sheets and towels, my face 


Jane—Our Stranger 287 

plastered with grease, and Bianca sat there, her little white 
face buried in her furs and laughed at me. When at last 
she had gone, Madeleine said the Princess had such a 
beautiful character. 

I felt that I was being bated like one of her famous 
bulls. I resolved to make no move. I refused to be goaded 
to an attack. I was afraid of her. 

Then one day Fan came to see me. Instead of rushing 
in with her usual shrill greeting, she walked up to me 
quietly, put her arm round me and laid her cheek against 
mine. 

“Pm so happy, Jane dear; I’m so happy.” Her voice 
was gentle. “I have found what I have been waiting for 
all my life.” She went down on her knees and looked up 
into my face. Hers was calm and rested and had upon it 
an expression of sweetness that I had never seen there be¬ 
fore. “I’m in love, Jane dear. I’m in love with the most 
wonderful man in the world. I wanted to tell you because 
I knew you’d be glad I was happy.” 

She stayed with me for an hour and told me all about it. 
It was the strangest thing, hard cynical Fan, suddenly be¬ 
come young and sentimental and timid. They had met at 
St. Moritz that Christmas. He was an Englishman, half 
Irish really, with a strong streak of Celt in him. His name 
was Mark. She called him Micky. He was very beautiful, 
as beautiful as a god. He had taught her to ski. They had 
been together high up on snowy peaks above the world. 
One day she had fallen and sprained her ankle. He had 
carried her down the mountain in his arms. He was strong 
and straight like a young tree. He wanted her to divorce 
Ivanoff and marry him. He said there was no other way 
for them to be happy. He wanted to meet me. Would I 
come to lunch now, right away? He was waiting for us. 
She had told him all about me. 

I went, of course. That boy,—you remember him, and 
how handsome he was, with his golden head and fresh 
bronzed cheeks and the long curly eyelashes fringing his 


288 Jane—Our Stranger 

blue eyes, and his broad sunny smile. He was too beauti- 
ful I had felt until he gave me that very broad smile. 

Our luncheon was a happy absurd affair. Those two 
were ridiculously in love—they behaved like children. They 
beamed, they blushed, they looked into each other’s eyes, 
he very shy and sweet and attentive, calling her Fan, and 
in talking to me trying to be dreadfully solemn. “Please, 
Madame de Joigny, make her be serious. She must divorce 
that chap, you know. There’s no alternative. It’s got to 
be done and I want it done right away. Please back 
me up. I say, you mustn’t smile, you know. It’s dead se¬ 
rious.” 

How could I help smiling? He was very appealing. He 
rumpled his hair and his eyes grew dark, and little beads of 
moisture stood out on his high tanned forehead. I looked 
at Fan. Poor Fan! so much older, so worn, so stamped 
with the stamp of her harrowing racketing years, and yet 
a new Fan with a young light in her eyes; I was disturbed 
and anxious. 

My fears seemed during the weeks that followed to be 
groundless. She held him. They continued their dream 
of bliss. He satisfied her utterly. It was of course his 
beauty that she loved. Always she had adored beauty in 
men—now she had it in its most charming aspect, fresh, 
clean, young. They had nothing in common, but their pas¬ 
sion. He was stupid and rather a prude. He had grown 
up with horses and dogs and a family of sisters in an 
English country house, had joined the army and then had 
gone to South Africa with his regiment. He had ideas 
about, womanliness and the honour of a gentleman and the 
duties of his class. He had never been in Paris before. 
Fan found no fault in him. 

She began taking him about with her. Society was at 
first amused and indulgent, then again the inevitable hap¬ 
pened. He became the rage. A number of women lost 
their heads over him. He was invited out without her. 
Soon he was everywhere in demand, and Fan rightly or 


Jane—Our Stranger 289 

wrongly persuaded him to go. This at first quite worried 
him. Women wanting him for themselves and finding him 
obstinately faithful, turned spiteful. He didn’t understand, 
for he wasn’t fatuous, but he must have heard a good many 
things about Fan that he didn’t like. 

I felt for him in a way. It seemed to me that he was 
holding his own pretty well and behaving on the whole 
very decently, but I wished that Fan’s divorce could be 
hurried along. She had hesitated about divorcing Ivanoff. 
“Of course,” she said, “he lives off women, but I’ve known 
that all along, and it doesn’t seem quite fair to get rid of 
him now—” but she had given in, in the end. 

The months dragged on. I began to wonder whether 
Micky would hold out. It had been difficult to find Ivan¬ 
off. A long time elapsed before the divorce papers could 
be served on him. 

Micky still stuck to Fan, but he began talking about com¬ 
promising her and, after a time, I had an impression that he 
stuck to her grimly, without enthusiasm. I imagined him to 
be cursing his own weak character. He was weak and he 
knew it, and so did we.' He clung to Fan as a woman should 
cling to a man. This did not make her despise him, it 
gave her a feeling of strength and safety. She encouraged 
his dependence on her and adopted the role of guide and 
counsellor. 

About this time I had a telephone message and a note 
from Bianca; both summoning me to her in her old per¬ 
emptory style. The message was that the Princess wished 
to see me on urgent matters and would be at home all that 
afternoon. I did not go. The note, received next morning 
was as follows: 

“It is silly and dangerous to stand out against me. I am 
attacked by all the demons you know about and if you don’t 
come, something unexpected and unpleasant will happen.” 


I paid no attention to it. 


290 Jane—Our Stranger 

Fan’s character and the quality of her life changed com¬ 
pletely; she gave up going out and sank into the deep 
secretive isolation of a woman who lives for one man alone. 
Her other men friends melted away. Many of her women 
friends dropped her. Not those of her own little band, 
but Micky didn’t like these. Claire who was fond of her, 
said —“Elle se rend ridicule avec ce gargon” and refused 
to have them to dinner together. Fan didn’t seem to care; 
she stayed more and more at home. This created for her 
serious money difficulties. She had never had any meals at 
all to speak of in her own flat, and her butcher’s bill had 
come to nothing, but now her boy had to be fed. He 
would come into dinner or lunch nearly every day, rosy and 
ravenous, and consume large beef steaks, fat cutlets, 
chickens, eggs, butter, sweets. Her bills became larger as her 
revenues dwindled. She could or would no longer avail her¬ 
self of her old sources of wealth. Her vogue was vanish¬ 
ing, and with it the amiability of dressmakers and restau¬ 
rant-keepers. She had a distaste now for gambling on the 
Bourse and asking Beaudoin for tips. Micky it seemed 
disapproved of women gambling. Her love affair was cost¬ 
ing her her livelihood; and Micky himself gave her nothing, 
perhaps because he had nothing much to give; perhaps 
because of some idea of honour, perhaps because he didn’t 
know how hard up she was. Fan was not the kind to let 
on. I know for a fact that she often went hungry to give 
him a good square meal, and I suspected that under her 
last year’s dresses, she didn’t have on enough to keep her 
warm. 

It became increasingly evident as the winter wore on 
that there were influences at work, perhaps a special in¬ 
fluence that was worrying them both, but I had no suspicion 
of the truth. Had I known I would have done something 
effective—I would have wasted no time with Bianca. 

Fan had burned her bridges. There was no going back 
for her now, no slipping down into the old stupefying 
pleasures. He had changed her, he had purified and 


jane—Our Stranger 291 

weakened her. There was for her a future with him or 
nothing. If she lost him, she would be done for. She 
knew this. She remained clear-headed and played her 
cards with desperate caution. And I watching her, saw just 
how frightened she was, but she told me nothing. 

I did not know that Bianca knew Micky. She went out 
very little now. People spoke of her living shut up in her 
house as they might have spoken of some lurid figure of 
legend, some beautiful ogress, gnashing her hungry teeth in 
a cave, but I didn’t listen when they talked of her. I wanted 
less than ever to hear / about her. She still saw Philibert, 
I knew, but this no longer concerned me. And she seemed 
to have given up pursuing me. I ought to have known she 
was up to something. I am sorry now that I refused to 
think about her, for I might have reasoned it out and dis¬ 
covered by a process of logic, what she was up to—I might 
have known that she would inevitably choose Micky for 
her own, just because he was in love with another woman, 
just because he was the pet of Paris, just because finally, 
Fan’s life depended on him and because I cared for Fan 
as if she were my own child. 

In March Fan began to lose her nerve. She said to me 
one day— 

“You know that I’m frightened but you don’t know how 
frightened. Some day, any day, tomorrow perhaps, he’ll 
see me as I am, a shrivelled-up hag who has played the 
devil with her life. Do you remember Jane, how your 
grandmother used to make us read the Bible on Sunday 
mornings in St. Mary’s Plains? I remember a phrase— 
'Born again.’ Well, I’ve been born again. My soul is 
beautiful, it’s as beautiful as the morning, but I’m as tired 
and ugly as ever—and my mind is as old as hell. I’ll lose 
him if I marry him, or if I don’t, I feel it in my bones. I 
used to think—T’m so much cleverer than he is that I’ll be 
able to keep him.’ My dear, don’t talk to me about clever¬ 
ness in holding a man. I’d give all the brains in the world 
for one year of beauty. If only I could be quite quite 


292 Jane—Our Stranger 

lovely for just one year. God! but it’s tiring to be al¬ 
ways trying to look nicer than you are,” 

On another day she broke down and sobbed and implored 
me to tell her that she was mistaken, and that he wouldn’t get 
tired of her. “He’s so sweet,”, she cried, “so sweet. He 
gets so cross with women who aren’t nice about me. When 
they make love to him he doesn’t seem to understand, he 
thinks them idiots, but each time that he comes back to 
me from one of them, I am afraid to look at him, afraid 
to see his eyes, veiled, shifting. It’s awful—too awful! He 
couldn’t hide anything from me, could he?” 

The next time I saw her she was the colour of ashes. 

“He hasn’t been near me for a week. Some one has got 
hold of him. I know who it is.” Her teeth chattered, she 
kept twisting her hands, but as I sat there miserably watch¬ 
ing her, the telephone rang, and she was off like a crazy 
woman. “Yes, yes, I’m at home, of course. Oh, Micky 
darling, do—do—come quick, quick”—and when she came 
back to me she was laughing and crying and saying over and 
over, “I’m a fool! I’m a fool.” 

It was the end of March that they made up their minds 
to go away together to Italy. She was very lucid and calm 
about it. Paris had got on their nerves. The life they 
were leading was impossible. His family might cut him 
off without a penny, but that couldn’t be helped. They 
would stay in Italy until the divorce decree was made 
absolute, and they could be married. Micky had a foolish 
idea about its being unwise for them to start together from 
Paris. They were to take the Simplon Express. She 
was to go ahead and board the train at La Roche Junction. 
As this was very near Ste. Clothilde, would I mind her go¬ 
ing there and stopping the night? 

As it happened I was going to Ste. Clothilde for Easter, a 
few days later, so I advanced the date of my journey and 
took her with me. 

How much she knew or suspected of what had been go¬ 
ing on between Micky and Bianca, I, do not know. She 


Jane—Our Stranger 293 

never told me. All that she ever said was—“I know he 
didn’t plan it deliberately, I know he didn’t mean to—when 
I left him.” But she must have known enough to be ter¬ 
ribly anxious, and I imagine that her decision to go off with 
him to Italy was a last desperate move. 

The Simplon Express left Paris at nine and stopped at 
La Roche at eleven o’clock at night. Micky was to take 
two tickets and the sleepers and get on the train at Paris, 
ready to lift her aboard. 

“Once I am on the train,” she kept saying, “I feel that 
I will be safe.” 

La Roche was a three hours’ motor run across country 
from Ste. Clothilde, the roads were winding lanes, confus¬ 
ing and indistinctly marked; so we decided that she had 
better do the distance before dark. She might puncture a 
tire, the motor might break down, anything might happen, 
she was feverishly anxious to allow herself plenty of time. 
She started at three o’clock. 

Her face was strained and seemed no bigger than a little 
wizened infant’s face as she said good-bye. For a mo¬ 
ment, on those immense stone steps in view of Philibert’s 
great formal gardens with their fountains and statues and 
broad gravel walks, she clung to me. Then with a final 
nervous hug flung away and jumped into the car. Her 
last words were “I’ll not come back till I’m married, Jane, 
so give me your blessing.” And out of my heart I gave it, 
kissing both my hands to her as the motor swung down 
the drive, and through the great iron gates. 

I felt singularly depressed. Fan and I in that formal 
and splendid panorama, were such minute creatures— 
were no bigger, no stronger than a couple of flies. 
Never had the Chateau de Ste. Clothilde seemed so cold, so 
inhuman, so foreign. I no longer disliked the place, I had 
grown used to it as I had grown used to other things. Its 
imposing architectural beauty, delicately majestic, serenely 
incongruous with nature, had made its effect on my mind. 
I understood to some extent the idea that had created it, the 


294 Jane—Our Stranger 

high peculiarity of taste that had chosen to mock at woods 
and fields, by building in their midst a palace smooth and 
fine as a thing of porcelain. Gradually I had come to ap¬ 
preciate the bland assurance of the achievement with all its 
bold frivolous contradictions of reason and common-sense. 
The moat that surrounded three sides of the chateau, was 
like a marble bath. It had no raison d'etre. Never had 
any owner dreamed of defending this place from any invad¬ 
ers, but the moat was there, full of clear water, palest green 
in which were reflected the silvery walls and high shining 
windows. And on the fourth side of the house, a joke 
perhaps, or to contradict the chilling effect of the moat, the 
eighteenth century architect who adored Marie Antoinette in 
her shepherdess costume, built an immense flight of steps 
straight across the length of the south facade, lovely, 
smooth, shallow steps, made to welcome a crowd of courtiers 
in satins and trailing silks, and dainty high-heeled slippers. 
It had amused me at times to imagine them there in that 
theatrical setting, and to recreate for myself the spectacle of 
their fetes galantes —but on the day that Fan left me to go 
to her hoy lover, I took no pleasure in the ghostly place. 
The sky was grey, the faintly budding trees mardshalled a 
far-off beyond the formal gardens, showed a haze of green 
that seemed to me sickly, and the suggestion of spring in 
the air gave me a feeling of “malaise” 

I remembered that Bianca and Philibert had gone off by 
the same Simplon Express five years before. They too 
must have stopped at the station of La Roche at eleven 
o’clock at night, or had they boarded the train farther down 
the line? I couldn’t remember what they were supposed 
to have done. All that had nothing to do with me, yet I 
was waiting for Philibert to arrive with a dozen people who 
would be my guests, his and mine. 

My chauffeur reported his return at nine o’clock that 
evening. They had reached La Roche at six as planned. 
He had left the Princess at the station. The Princess 
had not wished him to wait until the arrival of her 


Jane—Our Stranger 295 

train. He had insisted, auprks de Madame la Princesse, 
as I had told him to do, but she had been displeased and 
had sent him away. 

It was a rainy night, loud with a gusty April wind. The 
big rooms of the chateau were peopled with moving shadows 
and filled with whisperings and sighs. The wind moaned 
down the chimneys and set the far branches of the trees in 
the park to tossing. I was alone in the house save for the 
servants. Jinny had gone to her grandmother for a few 
days. 

I slept badly and woke early. My room was scarcely 
light. The sun was not yet up, or was obscured by a 
dismal sky. I listened apprehensively to the moaning rest¬ 
less morning. I listened intently for something—a sound, 
I didn’t know what. Then I heard it. The telephone down¬ 
stairs was ringing. I knew in an instant what that meant, 
and flew down the corridor, my heart pounding in my ribs. 
A clock somewhere was striking six, seven, I did not know 
which. A man’s voice spoke over the phone,— “La Gave 
de La Roche—La Princesse Ivanoff prie La Marquise de 
Joigny de venir la chercher en auto—La Princesse Vattendra 
a la Gare—La Princesse Jest trouvee malade dans la nuit et 
a manque son train.” I did not wait to hear any more. I 
was on my way in half an hour. The drive seemed terribly 
long, interminably long. Fan all night in the station of 
La Roche—what did it mean? 

I found her sitting on a packing case on the station plat¬ 
form, her head against the wall. Her face was bluish, her 
lips were a pale mauve, her hands, wet, like lumps of ice. 

“I’ve been sitting here all night,” she said in a dull voice. 
“I’m cold.” The station master helped me get her into 
the car. He seemed troubled and ashamed. He explained 
that they had not noticed her during the night. After the 
passing of the express he always went home to bed. 
The station was deserted during the middle of the night, 
and the waiting room locked. No passenger trains 
stopped between twelve and five in the morning. At five 


296 Jane—Our Stranger 

the Princess had been discovered by an employe but she had 
refused to move. They had tried to get her to drink some 
coffee from the buffet. She had asked him to telephone 
which he had done. The Princess had told him that she 
had felt faint during the evening while waiting and had 
thus missed the train. 

On the way home she did not speak. Her body was as 
heavy against me as a corpse. Her head kept slipping from 
my arm. I held her across my knees and gave her a sip of 
brandy now and then. Half way home she began to shiver. 
Her body shook, her teeth chattered, grating against each 
other. By the time we reached home, she was in a burning 
fever. 

That night Philibert entertained his guests alone. I sat 
with Fan in her room. About ten o’clock she stopped for 
a moment her terrible exhausting tossing from one side 
of the bed to the other and said— 

“I heard her laugh. She put her head out of the car 
window and laughed.” 

“Who laughed, dear?” 

“Bianca—she was with Micky in the train. They 
wouldn’t let me get on. I had no ticket—” 

She lay on her back now staring at the ceiling. Some 
one downstairs was playing a waltz on the piano. The 
wind had fallen. Out of doors the night was soft and still. 
Fan’s voice came from her dried lips, distinct and harsh. 

“I tried to get onto the steps of the train. The guard 
stopped me. Bianca must have fixed him beforehand. 
Micky was drunk. She had fixed him too, by making him 
drunk. He wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t been drunk. 
The railway carriage was very high, but I could see into 
the lighted corridor. I saw Micky. His face was red and 
stupid. I called ‘Micky—Micky, my ticket—quick; they 
won’t let me on without it.’ But he didn’t seem to hear me. 
Some one was behind him in the compartment. 

“The wagons-lits man asked me what I wanted. I 
screamed out—‘That gentleman has my ticket/ He half 


Jane—Our Stranger 297 

believed me. I saw him go in and speak to Micky, and look¬ 
ing up—you know how high the carriages are—I saw Micky 
shake his head. The attendant came back then and told me 
that I was mistaken, the gentleman was expecting no on.e, 
there was no place, the car was full. A whistle blew. The 
train started to move, I grabbed the handle by the steps. 
The wagons-lits man slammed the door shut above me. The 
train moved faster, I ran along holding on. ‘Micky’ I 
called, ‘Micky.’ Some one pulled me back, wrenched my 
hand loose, I stumbled, then I heard Bianca laugh, I saw 
her. She put her head out of the window and laughed. I 
was on all fours, in the wet. It was raining. I scrambled 
to my feet and ran down the platform. The train was 
moving fast by this time. The last carriage passed me. I 
reached the end of the platform. I saw the red light at the 
back of the train. They were in the train together, Micky 
and Bianca. They were together, in the little hot lighted 
compartment. They were going away together. She had 
taken my place. I stood there. The red light disappeared. 
There seemed to be no one about, it was very windy and 
cold. I don’t know what I did after that. I remember the 
steel rails stretching out under the arc light into the dark¬ 
ness. I wanted to run down the rails and catch the train, 
but the train was gone, and I was afraid.” 

They were dancing downstairs; I heard their feet scrap¬ 
ing; the time was changed to a fox trot—but Fan did not 
notice. She lay in a deep dark empty place of her own, cut 
of! from all the sights and sounds round her, watching some¬ 
thing, following something, the red lantern perhaps at the 
end of a train going away in the dark. 

I gave Philibert no explanation of Fan’s presence or of 
her illness. The other people in the house thought that she 
had come for a visit and had caught cold during a walk in 
the rain. I had told my maid to suggest this explanation to 
the servants. She understood. They did not give me away. 
Philibert never knew what had happened to Fan, but he 
found out when he went back to Paris that Bianca had gone 


298 Jane—Our Stranger 

away with the English boy. I remember wondering aft¬ 
erwards, how he liked being the one who was left be¬ 
hind, but I wondered vaguely, without any feeling for him. 
He mattered less than he had ever done. Nothing mattered 
for the time being but Fan, very ill, with congestion of the 
lungs, who wanted so much to die and end quickly what 
was already ended. But she couldn’t manage dying. Death 
eluded her. Life was unwilling to let her miserable body 
go. Like the remains of some sticky poisonous substance 
left in a battered dish, it stuck to her. Unwelcome, noisome, 
contaminated stuff of life, she couldn’t get rid of it al¬ 
though the convulsing frame tried to eject it from her lips. 
The horror of her coughing! the shaking of her pointed 
shoulders, the sound of her wrenching stomach, the rattling 
of her breath in her poor bony chest, the great deep resound¬ 
ing noises of pain in the fragile box that held her wasted 
lungs! Her eyes would start out at me in terror. She 
would clutch at me wildly and gasp—“Hold me. Hold me, 
Jane, I’m shaking to pieces,” and I would hold her through 
the long spasm, and then she would fall back exhausted and 
clammy with sweat. My heart ached and ached and ached. 
I wanted so, for her to die. If she had asked me to do it, I 
would have ended her life with an injection of morphine, 
but she said nothing. 

Early in May she had a bad haemmorrhage. All the scar¬ 
let blood of her veins seemed to me to be staining the cloths 
that I held to her mouth. And afterwards she lay at peace, 
and I thought “Thank God this is the end,” but it wasn’t. 
She rallied. Some strength came back to her. The doc¬ 
tors told me to take her to Switzerland. I did so, and did 
not remember until we were installed in our chalet near 
the sanatorium that we were within a few miles of the 
place where she had first met Micky, but she seemed not to 
mind at all being there, and would lie on the balcony in 
the sun looking across the valley at the mountains with a 
smile on her face, while I read aloud to her. Sometimes 
she talked of St. Mary’s Plains, sometimes of Paris, a great 


Jane—Our Stranger 299 

many people wrote to her, women who had been unkind 
when she was happy, were sorry for her now; sometimes 
she was gay, laughing and childishly pleased with new 
chintzes and tea sets and cushions that I ordered from Paris 
but she never spoke of Micky. 

Gradually she grew smaller and smaller. Her face was 
disappearing. There was nothing much left of it now, but 
a pointed nose with painfully wide distended nostrils, and 
two sunken eyes. I took the hand glass away from her 
dressing table one night when she was asleep—she didn’t 
ask for it, but one day not long afterwards, she said sud¬ 
denly “I would like something, Jane.” 

“What, my darling?” 

“I would like some new clothes, especially hats. I would 
like six new hats from Caroline Reboux”; and then she 
looked at me suspiciously like a sharp little witch. 

I said, of course, that I would write for them at once. 
She dictated the letter. Caroline was asked to send us 
fche newest and smartest models she had. “She knows my 
style,” said Fan from her pillow, “she’ll send something 
amusing, won’t she, Jane?” 

“I’m sure they’ll be ravishing, my dear.” 

“Do you think I’m silly, Jane? I’ve a feeling it will 
do me good to have those hats—when they come we’ll try 
them on, we’ll go for a drive. We’ll pick out the most be¬ 
coming ‘and drive to—but how long will it be before they 
come ?” 

“Not more than ten days—I should think,” I said avoid¬ 
ing her strange eager eyes. 

The next day she was very tired, she asked if there 
were letters but only looked at the envelopes, saying— 
“They don’t care a damn whether I live or die,” and the 
next day and the next, she asked again for letters only to 
fling them aside. 

In the evening she said, “I’m a beast, Jane—and a fool. 
Why did we write for those hats? I know I can’t wear 
them, but I’ve always wanted to order hats like that, half 


300 Jane—Our Stranger 

a dozen at a time without thinking what they cost. You 
won’t mind paying, I know—and I don’t mind now. I’ve 
been a beast about you, Jane, I used to envy you so many 
things.” 

‘‘What for instance—?” 

“Well, your ermine coat with the hundreds of little black 
tails, the sable cape, and your jade necklace, and your 
pearls. I always adored pearls. I believe I could have sold 
my soul for pearls like yours at one time. Funny, isn’t it? 
Lucky no one ever offered me any—no one ever did you 
know. I wasn’t the kind to have ropes of pearls given me 
for the asking. If I had only been beautiful, Jane—I would 
have gone to the dogs sure as fate, but oh, I’d have had a 
good time. As it is, I don’t seem to have had much fun, now 
that I think of it. My past is like a dingy deep pocket 
with a hole in it somewhere. I’ve been dropping trinkets 
into it all my life, and now I find it’s empty, just an empty 
dark pocket—that’s my past.” She gave her old shrill laugh. 
“It’s damn funny isn’t it, Jane—life, I mean. We go on, 
hoping, hoping, looking forward, looking for something, 
thinking always there’s something nice ahead for us, being 
cheated all the time, never admitting it, never giving in, al¬ 
ways expecting—fooling ourselves, being fooled—up to the 
very end. What makes us like that ? What keeps us going ? 
Who invents the string of lies we believe in?” 

She lay propped up on pillows, her head sunk between her 
pointed shoulders, her knees sharp as pegs pushing up the 
bed-clothes, and her skinny hands like birds’ claws picked 
at the lace on her sleeve. 

“Happiness—Jane? I was happy once, you know. It 
made me good, at least I thought so. I felt good. I tried 
to be good. Everything dropped away; it was like moult¬ 
ing. I came out a plucked chicken, no fine feathers left. 
What was the use? I was too far gone I suppose, when it 
came—” She stared up at me, her cheek bones flushed, her 
wide nostrils, great black holes in her small face, palpitat¬ 
ing. “Love came—now death—and I’m not good enough 


Jane—Our Stranger 301 

for that either. What’s death to me? Nothing. I can’t 
rise to meet it. I want some new hats. That’s all I can 
think about, all I can bear to think about. My death Jane, 
like my life, is empty. I fill up the emptiness with things, 
little things.” She held her two hands against her side as 
if the emptiness were there, hurting her. “Jane,” she said 
suddenly, “I wonder—” Her eyes widened, and in them I 
saw the shadow of the great terror that gets us all in the 
end. She stared, her dreadful gaping nostrils dilating, her 
mouth open, her hands out in front of her, pushing against 
the air. Then suddenly she laughed. “No, no, damn it all, 
let’s be frivolous up to the end. It’s as good a way as an¬ 
other of seeing the business through.” 

She died the end of July, with all her new hats strewn 
round the room and a piece of wonderful lace in her hands. 
“Lovely, lovely lace, isn’t it, Jane?” she had said a minute 
before, and then there was a tearing sound in her chest and 
the scarlet blood flowing from her mouth, and one choking 
cry as I sprang to her side. 

“Jane—Jane—I’m going now and I’ve not seen him. 
Jane, tell him, tell Micky I hoped—” Her eyes were agon¬ 
ized. The blood choked her. She couldn’t speak, but I 
saw in her eyes what she meant—terribly I saw—how she 
had believed up to the end that Micky would come back to 
her. , 

It was Ivanoff who came and Ivanoff, great hulking shame¬ 
ful pitiable creature who wept over her poor lonely coffin. 
We brought her back to Paris, Ivanoff and I, and buried 
her in Pere-Lachaise one rainy afternoon and then he dis¬ 
appeared again for the last time. 

I went straight to Deauville. Philibert was there with 
his mother and Jinny, but I went to find Bianca. I had 
seen in the paper that she was at the Normandy. 

I may have been out of my mind, I don’t know. I remem¬ 
ber that I thought I had Fan’s disease, but that does not 
prove that I was off my head. The smell of it was in my 
breath, the dry sound of its hacking cough in my ears, 


302 Jane—Our Stranger 

and constantly I saw before me, Fan herself, pallid, shiny 
with sweat, two black holes in her face opening, panting 
for breath—and behind her, looking over her dank head I 
saw Bianca, her pointed lips smiling, cruel as only she in all 
heaven and earth could be cruel. 

It is true that I took a revolver with me to the Casino 
that night. I remember putting it in my silk bag and pre¬ 
tending at dinner that I had a lot of gold pieces by me, for 
luck. I had. I was going to the Casino to gamble. I 
would find a place opposite Bianca and sit her out. You 
remember the scene. People talked of it enough Heaven 
knows. One would have supposed women never had played 
high before. A crowd gathered round us—half Paris was 
there. I remember the Tobacco King, a very fat man with 
a red face. It pleased him at first, he swelled with im¬ 
portance. By three in the morning he had lost five hun¬ 
dred thousand francs. His place was taken by the 
Brazilian millionaire—Chenal, the opera star was opposite. 
A number of men accustomed to playing in the men’s rooms, 
joined our table. They half realized there was more in it 
than just a game. Bianca opposite me, was white as a sheet. 
Her face was like a white moon among all those red bloated 
faces. I watched her. I watched her long carmine finger 
nails glinting as she handled her piles of folded notes. We 
played against each other. The luck was against me after 
the Tobacco King left. I was losing heavily. The fact 
made no impression on me. I wasn’t playing with Bianca 
for money. The little wads of thousand franc notes were 
symbols. The game was a blind. I went Banco against her 
as a matter of course, automatically, but all the time I was 
playing another game. I was repeating silently to myself, 
words that were meant for her. Your psycho-therapists 
would say I was trying to hypnotize her, to subject her to 
my suggestion. Well, I was; I was attacking her brain 
with all the power of my will. I was concentrated on her 
to break her down. I was determined to frighten her, to 
fill her with dread, with frantic dread of my hatred, my 


Jane—Our Stranger 303 

loathing, my determination to make her pay for what she 
had done. I succeeded. At four o’clock she began to 
show signs; attendants kept bringing her whiskey, liqueurs, 
champagne; her face had turned blueish, she went on. 
She was still winning. But she knew now, that that wouldn’t 
help her. At five I saw her waver. She started to scrape 
together her winnings. I did the same. She looked into 
my face; it was evident to her that if she left the table I 
would follow her. She went on playing. We sat there 
as you know till six o’clock. We left the Casino as the 
doors closed—we left together. 

“I am going with you, Bianca—don’t hurry, there is no 
hurry”—I kept her by my side. The sun was rising as 
we crossed towards the Normandy. “No—” I objected, 
“not there—come out on the beach.” It was low tide. 
The sea was still. A light mist hung along the horizon. 
The little waves glinted in the first sun rays. We went out 
across the wet sand, Bianca’s turquoise blue cape trailing be¬ 
hind her in the little pools where crabs scuttled out of the 
way of our high satin heels. The sunlight bathed us. It 
showed her pallid as a corpse. What I looked to her, I do 
not know. Our two long shadows moved ahead of us to 
the edge of the water. There was no one near. Behind us 
stretched the sands—in front of us the sea—afar out, was 
a ship, minute white sails, sea birds darted in the blue— 
space—sunlight—silence. We faced each other, and I told 
her very briefly what was in my mind. I told her that the 
earth must be rid of her, at any rate that part of the earth 
which held me, that I had a revolver in my bag and was 
quite prepared if necessary to put an end to her life, or 
give it to her, and leave her to do it herself. On the other 
hand I saw no particular point in suffering the consequences 
of her death, and would be content if she disappeared for 
ever from the world that I knew, from Paris, from France, 
from the civilized places where ordinary men and women 
like myself were in the -habit of living. I told her that I 
would not allow her to live anywhere any longer where I 


304 Jane—Our Stranger 

was—that she could choose—either she would go—take her¬ 
self off—disappear for ever—or shoot herself there in my 
presence— If she didn’t, I would kill her the next time I 
came across her. 

It sounds extraordinarily silly and puerile as I relate this 
but it did not sound silly to Bianca. You must remem¬ 
ber that I knew Bianca and knew just how that sort of 
thing might affect her—and knew that physically she had ah 
ways been afraid of me. I counted on her superstition, her 
morbidness, her lassitude. I counted on the stillness, the 
wide mysterious dawn, the still sea, the cold sky—and I 
counted on her lack of character—on her “manque d’equi- 
libre” I was right. I told her that she was loathesome and 
that at bottom she loathed herself; I told her that she was, 
sick of loving herself and in fact, couldn’t go on much 
longer even pretending to herself that she wasn’t vile. I 
told her that her vanity was strained to the breaking point, 
that any day it might snap and that she would collapse. 
When she could no longer keep up the fiction of her own 
interest to herself what could she do? Nothing. She 
would be a drivelling idiot—she would go insane as she 
had feared. Coldly I repeated it, over and over. She was 
diseased; she was a maniac—an egotistical maniac and 
she would one day become a raving lunatic. She could take 
her choice. End it now—or go off and develop her lunacy 
elsewhere in some far country where the curse of her pres¬ 
ence would affect no one that mattered to me. 

I can see her now—as she was that morning—standing in 
the sunlight in her evening dress, her feet wet, her cloak 
trailing on the sand, her face working. I had never seen 
her face twist before. That morning in the glaring sun, 
it twitched and jerked and pulled, until almost I thought 
that her mind had snapped and that she was already the 
idiot I had prophesied, but she pulled herself together to 
some extent and managed after a while to speak. What 
she said was trivial. 

“It is your fault, Jane—you wouldn’t do what I wanted 


Jane—Our Stranger 305 

so I had to hurt you again—you shouldn’t blame me—you 
know that I am possessed of devils— Well, have it your 
own way—I’ll go. Don’t look at me like that—I’ll go, I tell 
you. Stop looking, you frighten me— Yes, I’m afraid of 
you—I admit it. Your look is a curse in itself— Wasn’t I 
cursed enough when I was born—what have I done after 
all—Fan’s death—? Pooh! She’d have died any way.” 

But at that I gripped her. I must have twisted her arms. 
She gave a shriek, then a whimper as I let her go, and stag¬ 
gered away from me, back towards the shore. I followed 
her as far as the bathing boxes; all the way she made little 
noises like a wounded animal, whimpering, sniffing, al¬ 
most growling. It was horrid. Her long swaying stagger¬ 
ing figure, her head hanging forward, her hands twisting 
her clothes round her, clutching her sides—her shoulders 
twitching; she was, I suppose, on the verge of hysterics. 
I felt no pity for her. The sight of her was shocking and 
disgusting. She had gone to pieces as I thought she would 
do. She had no character. 

I watched her go— From the wooden walk I watched 
her stumble towards the hotel, break into a run, turn to look 
back, disappear. It was seven o’clock. An attendant 
opened a cabin for me. I stripped and swam out—out—a 
mile, two miles, three, I don’t know. When I got back 
to the villa Jinny was at breakfast. I felt hungry. We 
laughed over our honey and rolls. At twelve I was told 
that Bianca had left Deauville by motor. 

That was in 1913, the year before the war. 


VIII 

J INNY liked to wear silks and velvets when she was 
quite a little girl. Her taste for pretty clothes was 
something more than childish vanity. I used often to 
find her in the room lined with cupboards where my dresses 
were kept, sitting on the floor amid a heap of soft shining 
garments, that she had dragged from their hooks, stroking 
the fabrics lovingly, and purring to herself like a blissful 
kitten. She couldn’t bear the touch of wool or starched 
cambric, and screamed herself into hysterics when in obedi¬ 
ence to the doctor’s orders, I tried one winter to put her into 
woollen combinations. Her father humoured her in this. 
I think it rather pleased him that she should be so delicately 
fastidious. He found in it a proof of an exquisite sensibility 
and likened her to the fairy-tale princess of the crumpled 
rose leaf. Unfortunately he told Jinny the story and she 
immediately accepted it as illustrative of herself, acted it 
out literally in her nursery, obliging her nursemaid to make 
and remake her little bed, to smooth and stroke and smooth 
again until every imaginary wrinkle in the soft sheets was 
gone, before she would consent to get into it. This habit 
lasted for some weeks until she read one day in her “his- 
toire sainte” of a saint who had acquired great spiritual 
blessing by sleeping on the floor of her cell, whereupon 
she took no more interest in the way her bed was made. 
The nurse was delighted until she discovered that as soon 
as she had turned down the light and left the room, Jinny 
hopped out of bed and lay down on the floor, choosing 
fortunately a spot near the radiator. The harassed women, 
governess, nurse and nursemaid said nothing to me the first 
time, nor the second that they found her asleep on the floor, 

306 


Jane—Our Stranger 307 

but finally came to me explaining that Mademoiselle was very 
determined to die of pneumonia. 

Jinny looked at me with grave shining eyes when I asked 
her what such naughtiness meant. 

“It is not naughtiness at all, Mamma, you misunderstand, 
it is the saintly life, “la sainte vie ” 

Fortunately I was sufficiently aware of her romantic ab¬ 
sorption in the lives of the saints, and of her habit of 
applying everything that she read or heard to herself, to 
guess what influence was working on her. The “saintly 
life” had come up before. She had already had periods of 
fasting that had given way before her great liking for bon¬ 
bons, and periods of prayer, that had given way to sleepi¬ 
ness, and had even attempted at one time to beat her little 
shoulders with a strap off a trunk, all of which things had 
worried me considerably, but none of which had been im¬ 
mediately dangerous to her health, so I entered straight upon 
the subject in as sympathetic a tone, that is on as high a 
moral ground as I could find, using all my wits to adapt 
my conversation and my thought to her mind, as if, as in¬ 
deed may have been the case, her idea was more lucid than 
my own. 

“Darling,” I said in a tone as grave as the one she had 
used to me, but with a certain timidity that she in her exalta¬ 
tion of the young devotee had certainly not felt at all, 
“the saintly life is a beautiful thing when rightly under¬ 
stood; it is too beautiful to be entered upon easily and 
capriciously. If you have a true wish to model your life on 
that of the saints who gave up every comfort for the salva¬ 
tion of their souls, then I will help you. I will do it with 
you. We will change everything. We will take away all 
the pretty things, and empty these rooms, yours and mine, 
of the pictures, and the rugs, keeping only the strict neces¬ 
saries. We will sleep on hard beds, floor, we will eat bread 
and water every day, nothing more; we will wear no more 
nice clothes, we will each have a serge dress and very plain 
underwear, of some strong cotton stuff, we will—” 


308 Jane—Our Stranger 

But poor Jinny had grown quite pale. “Oh, Mummy, 
Mummy, you are cruel. Don’t you see I can’t do all that? 
Don’t you want me to want to be good.” 

That you see ended well. She cried a little in my arms, 
and listened quietly as I explained that being good was 
quite another thing to the saintly life as she had understood 
it, and that this latter was not vouchsafed to children, and 
we arranged between us that it would be much more truly 
good, to take a great many baskets of toys to the little poor 
crippled children in the big hospitals than to jump out of 
bed when no one was looking, but I was not immeasurably 
reassured by my victory. With Jinny it was always a case 
of its being all right till the next time, and the next time was 
never slow in coming. 

I take it that my own feeling for Jinny needs no explana¬ 
tion. I am a simple woman, and I was her mother; she was 
all that I had. But Philibert loving her so much was curi¬ 
ous, don’t you think? It seemed so inconsistent of him! 
I don’t even now understand it. Perhaps the most obvious 
explanation is the real one. Perhaps it was just because 
she was so very attractive. Had she been ugly I believe 
that he would have disliked her. She was never ugly, she 
had never had an awkward age. At fourteen she had al¬ 
ready that look of costliness, of something luxurious, sump¬ 
tuous and precious that she has today. She was slender 
and fragile and smooth. At times she suggested a child 
Venus by Botticelli. Her mouth had the delicate drooping 
curve of some of his Madonnas, her hands were full and soft 
and dimpled with delicate tapering fingers. Sensuous idle 
hands, they were to her instruments of pleasure. Touching 
things conveyed to her some special delight; with her fin¬ 
ger tips she enjoyed. I know for I have watched those 
hands for years, moving softly and deftly over lovely sur¬ 
faces, and following the contours of flowers, of porcelain 
vases, but she never did anything practical with them. Even 
embroidery, she disliked. But jigsaw puzzles amused her— 
she and Philibert always had one somewhere spread 


Jane—Our Stranger 309 

out on a table. They spent hours together fitting in the 
innumerable tiny bits, their heads close together, excitedly 
comparing, fitting, exclaiming. Philibert liked the idea of 
his daughter’s distaste for doing anything useful. He en¬ 
couraged her laziness and her absurd little air of languid 
hauteur. When she dropped a glove or handkerchief and 
waited for a servant to pick it up for her, he laughed. 

Sometimes I tried to reason with him. 

“You are spoiling her,” I said on more than one occasion, 
but he only shrugged his shoulders. 

“Don’t you see, Philibert?” I would insist, “that it is 
bad for her to live in this atmosphere?” 

“What atmosphere?” 

“The atmosphere of this house, of Paris, of the world we 
live in.” 

“Well, my dear, it is her house, her Paris, her world— 
she’s born to it, and belongs to it, so she may as well grow 
up in it. What would you have for her—something more 
like your own home over there, eh?—the place that turned 
you out, so admirably fitted for our European life—you want 
her to be as you were, is that it?” 

“God forbid.” 

“Well then—” 

I couldn’t argue with him. I couldn’t tell him what I 
really felt and feared, or explain to him how I hated for 
Jinny, all the things that I now accepted for myself, for he 
was one of those things, the principle one; I had accepted 
him. I had even grown to understand him, and if it hadn’t 
been for Jinny, I felt that we might become friends. His 
extravagances, his cynicism, his fondness for women were 
things that I now took for granted. They no longer bothered 
me. For me, he would do now, I no longer asked anything 
of him, but for Jinny he wasn’t half good enough. As a 
father to my child, I found him impossible. 

One often hears of estranged couples being brought to¬ 
gether by their love for a child. With Philibert and myself, 
it was the contrary. We were both jealous of Jinny. We 


310 Jane—Our Stranger 

were afraid, each one, that she loved the other best, and our 
nervousness on this point acted to keep us in each other’s 
company while it made friendship impossible. Neither of 
us liked to leave the other alone with her for any length of 
time. I had stayed with Fan for three months and had 
come back to find Jinny hanging on her father’s every 
word, and to find what I imagined was a coldness between 
her and myself. This may have been my imagination, or it 
may have been true; I don’t know, but I suspected Phili¬ 
bert of working to alienate her from me, and he suspected 
me of the same thing. If I suggested taking Jinny to Ste. 
Clothilde for a fortnight, he either found a way of keeping 
us in Paris or accompanied us, and if Philibert wanted for 
some reason to go away, to London or Berlin or Biarritz, 
he was haunted by the idea that in his absence I might steal 
a march on him with Jinny, so really bothered I mean, that 
nine times out of ten, he would give up going unless I went 
with him. The result was that we were more constantly 
together than we had been since the first year of our mar¬ 
riage. 

Looking back now to that winter of 1913-14 I see it as a 
season of delirium, of fever, of madness. Paris glows 
there, at the eve of war, in a lurid blaze of brilliance, its 
people giddy, intoxicated, dancing over the quaking surface 
of a civilization that was cracking under them. A period 
in the history of the human race was drawing to a close. 
The old earth was rushing towards the greatest calamity 
of our time, carrying with it swarming continents that in a 
few months were to seethe and smoke like beds of boiling 
lava—and the people of the earth as if aware that the days 
of pleasure were numbered, were possessed by a frenzy. I 
say the people of the earth, but I mean of course, the rich, 
the idle, the foolish, the so-called fortunate who make up 
society and of whom Philibert and I were the most idle, 
the most foolish, as we were perhaps the richest. 

That winter marked the height of our folly and of our 


Jane—Our Stranger 31 i 

worldly brilliance, and for me it marked at the same time 
the deepest depth of futility and cowardice. 

Philibert and I were like two runaway horses harnessed 
together, and running blindly, with the smart showy vehicle 
of our empty life rattling and lurching behind us, and poor 
little Jinny inside it. 

His extravagance that winter was colossal. I did not try 
to restrain it. He felt the inertia of old age coming on him, 
and was having a last desperate fling: I felt sorry for him. 
His parties were fantastic. He bought the servants’ under¬ 
linen at Doucet’s; I only laughed when he told me. Money ? 
Why not spend it! The more he spent, the less would be 
left for Jinny, and that, I argued, was all to the good. If 
only he could manage to run through the whole lot, then 
Jinny and I would be free. Dinner succeeded dinner, 
dance followed dance. We received half Europe and were 
entertained in a dozen capitals. London, Brussels, Rome, 
Madrid, we took them all in. It was very different from 
my picnic trips with you and Clementine when we travelled 
second-class, carried paper bags of sandwiches and had liter¬ 
ary adventures in old book shops with ancient scholars in 
skull-caps and spectacles. Philibert and I travelled in Rolls 
Royces or in private trains. We had maids and valets and 
couriers to smooth away every discomfort and every bit 
of unexpectedness. Philibert never missed his morning 
bath and massage, his Swede, too, travelled with us. 

It was not very interesting. One glass of champagne is 
like another. Royal palaces are as alike as cabbages. 
Everywhere we met the same people and did the same things. 
We danced, we gambled, we gossiped, we ate and drank and 
changed our clothes, and I was often bored, and often 
gloomy. Too much brilliance has the effect of darkness. 

In my dismal moods I told myself that I hated it, but 
probably I didn’t. No doubt it had become necessary to 
me to be surrounded by a crowd of flatterers. We are all 
fools— And I had no precise idea of myself. Even at night, 


312 Jane—Our Stranger 

when I was alone, and when I should have been stripped 
naked to my soul in the dark, I was still wrapped about 
to my own eyes, in the flattering disguises of the world’s 
adulation. 

In Jinny’s eyes alone did I seem to see myself as I really 
was. I trembled as I looked into them. 

I wonder if all women are afraid of their children? Per¬ 
haps not, the woman who has the love of her husband and a 
clear conscience and a sure hope of heaven. I had none of 
these things, and I was afraid. I had staked everything 
on Jinny, but my conscience was not clear about her. In¬ 
stead of a hope of heaven, I had the hope of her happiness 
and yet I knew that I was not doing what was necessary 
to realize it. What I was doing was, when one thought it 
out, futile and ridiculous. I was wasting my life to save 
hers; because of her, I had been involved in this endless 
round of futility and I was behaving as if I believed that 
if I were wretched enough, she would be happy. 

What I wanted most of all was to save her from an ex¬ 
perience like my own. For her, there were to be no wretched 
sordid compromises with life, no unclean pleasures, no 
subterfuges, no lying, no fear. She was to remain good 
and brave and lovely and I was to find a true man for her 
who would love her as I longed to have her loved, reverently. 

And in the meantime, she was growing up surrounded 
by slavish servants, by doting relatives, by luxury and dis¬ 
sipation and all that I did to protect her, was to shut her 
up as much as possible in the schoolroom. 

I had always been in the habit of talking to her of 
Patience Forbes, her great aunt in America. It had 
seemed to me important for Jinny to understand and value 
my people. I wanted her to love the woman who had so 
loved me. To secure for that distant lonely admirable char¬ 
acter the respect and affection of my child was, it seemed to 
me, my duty. And as a little girl Jinny had been interested 
in hearing about the Grey House in St. Mary’s Plains, the 
waggon slide down the cellar door, the attic full of old trunks, 


Jane—Our Stranger 313 

crammed with faded panniered dresses and poke-bonnets, 
and the back garden full of hollyhocks and bachelor but¬ 
tons, and larkspur. She liked to hear of the great river 
that one glimpsed between the houses at the bottom of the 
street behind the garden, and of the ships that came smiling 
down laden with lumber from the great forests, and she 
would climb into my lap and say—“Now tell me more 
about when you were a little girl”—but as she grew older 
she lost interest in these stories, and was more and more un¬ 
willing to write to her great aunt and one day, when I 
finished reading to her a letter from Patience, she gave a 
sigh and said petulently, 

‘‘What a boring life— ‘Quelle vie ennuyeuse! ” 

“Jinny!” I exclaimed sharply. 

“But it is, Mummy. It must be. I see her there. Ah, 
Mon Dieu, so dismal. ‘Une vieille—vieillef An old old 
one—in dusty black clothes, in a horrid little room. All her 
stuffed birds round her in glass cases—so funny! But 
the atmosphere is cold. It sets the teeth on edge, and she 
is ugly, like a man, with big feet and hands. There— 
look!” She took up poor Aunt Patty’s photograph from 
the table. “Look—what has that old woman to do with 
me? Why does she write to me ‘My darling little Gene¬ 
vieve’—I’m not her darling, I don’t love her at all. I 
don’t want to think of her.” 

I was very angry. “Jinny, you make me ashamed.” 

“I can’t help it,” she almost screamed at me. “I can’t 
help it. Cest plus fort que moi —she’s strange—she’s ugly.” 
And she flung the photograph on the floor and stamped 
her feet—her face was white, her eyes blazing—“I don’t 
want to think she belongs to us. I don’t want you to love 
her,” and she flung herself into a chair in a paroxysm of 
angry tears. 

I sent her to bed; it was five o’clock in the afternoon, 
and gave orders that she was to have bread and milk for 
her supper but when I went to her later in the evening, 
though she was quiet, she stuck to her idea. 


314 Jane—Our Stranger 

“What did you mean by your terrible behaviour, Jinny?” 

She eyed me gravely from her pillow. 

“I don’t know, except that it is all dismal and strange 
in America, and I can’t like Great Aunt, and if I can’t— 
why then I can’t— Cela ne se commande pas” 

I sat beside her, strangely depressed. Her little white 
bed with its rosy hangings, her curly blond head on the 
lace pillow, the white fur rug, the shaded lamp, the flicker¬ 
ing fire, swam before me, blurred; I half closed my eyes, 
and saw another child, an ugly child with a long pigtail, 
in a cotton nightgown and flannel wrapper, kneeling by an 
old wooden bed in a bare little room, and a tall grizzled 
woman standing with a candle while the child said her pray¬ 
ers. “God bless my mother in Paris and take me to her 
soon, and make me keep my temper and be like my Aunt 
Patty—” 

I had failed—I had failed. 

But Jinny’s voice roused me. “Papa says it is an ugly 
country, America—miles and miles of empty fields, just 
grass and grass stretching all round.” 

“Your father has never been there.” 

“I know, but he knows about it. He says he would never 
go there, not for anything, and that I needn’t—so if Pm 
never to see Great Aunt—why bother ?” 

Why indeed? They were too much for me, those two, 
my husband and my child. 

In my depressed moods I used to go to see Clementine. 
She listened patiently, lying on a couch in purple pyjamas, 
smoking a cigarette through a holder a foot long, and watch¬ 
ing me intently while I explained that I was no longer in 
control of my own life, that I was as impotent as a paralytic, 
and that I hadn’t even the feeling of being a part of anything 
that made up existence. 

“It is all unreal—I have lost touch. I can’t grasp 
anything. There’s a space,—•' infranchissable/ between me 
and it. At times I feel that the only reality is the past, the 


Jane—Our Stranger 315 

remote past. My childhood is real to me, nothing much else. 
I remember my home in America, now this minute sitting 
in your room, more vividly than the house I left half an 
hour ago. Pleasure is a narcotic—I drug myself with it, 
but I don’t really understand joy—I understand sorrow. Joy 
is a perfume that evaporates—suffering is a poison that re¬ 
mains.” 

Clementine broke in abruptly. 

“Ma chere amie —take my advice, I know what you need— 
take a lover.” 

I burst out laughing, buFshe eyed me gravely. 

“You laugh, but I know what I am saying. Your life is 
abnormal, dont go against nature.” She rolled over on an 
elbow and laid a hand on my knee. “You must love—it will 
wash away all your sick fancies. You’ll see. Any one 
you’ve a liking for will do; surely you like some one ? Don’t 
be romantic, be practical. Face facts. Take things as they 
are, and you will find beauty, mystery, rapture and sanity. 
Beyond the little prosaic door of compromise you will find 
the world of dreams. Believe me, materialism is the only 
road to happy illusion, and to remain sane, we must have 
illusions.” 

Well, that was her point of view, and she may have been 
right. I never found out. I didn’t take her advice. Per¬ 
haps had I done so, I would be in Paris now content with 
the illusion she promised me. Who knows? 

That sort of thing is the solution of most lives. A grow¬ 
ing lassitude, a growing fear, the feeling that one has missed 
life, that it will soon be too late, and at last we give in and 
take in the place of what we wanted, what we can get. 

I couldn’t. There was no one about who in the slightest 
degree resembled a lover—my lover. And I was sick of 
the subject of love. For years and years and years it had 
been served up to me, for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner. 
Every theatre, every music hall, every novel one opened, 
every comic paper was full of it. Travestied, caricatured, 


316 Jane—Our Stranger 

perverted or idealized, but always the same old thing—sex 
—sex—sex in all its ramifications—always monotonously the 
same; it bored me to extinction. 

Philibert, fastening on this woman then that one, all my 
friends falling in and out of love, like ducks round a muddy 
pond; it put me in a rage with the world. 

The War came—and with it the end of a world. 

I sometimes think that God’s final day of judgment will 
not be so very different. The Edict will go out from 
Heaven. Life will stop. Humanity suddenly arrested on 
the edge of time will look over the precipice of Eternity— 
will pause—will shudder—then, why should it not act? Why 
not revolt as it did in 1914 against the menace of universal 
destruction? Was it not just like that? 

Death was let loose on the earth. And men refusing to 
die, gave their lives so that man might live. 

The obliteration of life! Something else took its place. 
All the usual things of life disappeared, human relation¬ 
ships, amusements, ambitions, business, hope, comfort. The 
people vanished. No familiar faces anywhere. Armies took 
their place. * Men were changed infto soldiers, all alike. 
Women were turned into nurses. Their personalities fell 
from them, they appeared again, a mass of workers, colour¬ 
less, uniform, with white set faces in professional clothes. 

Our world, Philibert’s and mine suddenly fell to pieces; 
all the men servants left, most of the women, called to their 
houses to send their men to the war. Philibert found him¬ 
self one morning a private in an auxiliary service of the 
army; he too disappeared. The enemy was marching on 
Paris; Ludovic telephoned me to say that I had best leave 
for Bordeaux. I packed off Jinny to Nice with her grand¬ 
mother. A woman whose work in the slums I had been in¬ 
terested in for some years, was taking an equipe of nurses 
to the front. I went with her. Philibert’s secretary had 
orders to pack up all the valuables in the house. I forgot 
them. I forgot everything. 


Jane—Our Stranger 317 

We went as you know to Alsace—were taken prisoners— 
sent back again. 

On regaining Paris, I turned the house that I had hated 
into a hospital. Most of its treasures had already been 
packed up and sent away to a place of safety. The empty 
salons were turned into wards, my boudoir into an operat¬ 
ing room. I enjoyed filling the place with rows of white 
iron beds and glass topped tables and basins and pails and 
bottles and bandages. It had been a hateful house, it made 
a good hospital. When it was in running order, I left again 
for the front. 

I enjoyed the War. It set me free. I reverted to type, 
became a savage, enjoyed myself. In a wooden hut, on a 
sea of quaking mud under a cracking sky, I lived an immense 
life. I was a giant—I was colossal—I dwelt in chaos and 
was calm. With death let loose on the earth, I felt life 
pouring through me, beating in me; I exulted. Danger, a 
roaring noise, cold, fatigue, hunger, these my rations, agreed 
with me. I was a giantess with chilblains, and a chronic 
backache; I was a link in an immense machine, an atom, a 
speck in an innumerable host of atoms like myself, autom¬ 
atons, humble ugly minute things doomed to die, immortal 
spirits, human beings, my brothers. 

I observed that my little tin trunk contained everything 
needful for life; soap, warm clothes, rubber boots, a brush 
and comb. I wanted nothing; I was content to go for days 
without a bath. The beef and white beans of the soldier 
was sufficient. I ate it ravenously. 

I worked and was happy. I lifted battered men in my 
arms, soothed their pain, washed their bodies, scrubbed their 
feet; poor ugly swollen feet tramping to death in grotesque 
boots, socks rotting away in them. I enjoyed scrubbing 
them. I had, for the business, pails of hot water, scrubbing 
brushes, the kind one uses for floors, and slabs of yellow 
soap. For some months, it was my job to wash the wounded 
who came in from the trenches. Many of them were peas- 


318 Jane—Our Stranger 

ants, old bearded men who talked patois, in soft guttural 
voices and called me sister. Their great coats were covered 
with mud and blood, they crawled with vermin. I loved 
them. They had given their lives, they had given up their 
homes, their deep ploughed fields, their children, their cattle. 
They did not complain. Their stubborn souls looked out at 
me kindly from weary eyes, sunk under shaggy brows, and 
loving them, my brothers, I loved France, the France I had 
not, before, known. 

We were sent from one part of the front to another. Our 
eqmpe had a good reputation. Passing through Paris from 
time to time, I found opportunities for using money. I 
gave, gratefully. Supply depots were organized. Every 
one was in need, every one was doing something. The de 
Joigny family were pleased with me. They made a great 
fuss over me when I came to Paris. They spoke of my 
generosity, my devotion, my courage. I loved them too, 
bulking them together with my comrades, my poilus, the 
men of France. 

I had lost track of Philibert during the first months of 
the war. Then I heard that he had been put to guard 
one of the Paris gates. He stayed there for three months, 
standing in the road, with a gun, stopping the motors of 
officers, looking at passes. Poor Philibert! And there was 
no one to take any interest now in what became of him. His 
world was finished, his friends could do nothing for him. 
The France that was at war with Germany did not know him. 
The men who were leading the nation had never heard of 
him, or if they had, remembered him with a sneer. 

Ludovic had entered one of the ministries. I went to him. 
Philibert, I pointed out, was being wasted. He was a lin¬ 
guist. A month later he was given the rank of interpreter 
and attached to the General Staff. Occasionally he accom¬ 
panied Ludovic to London, or Rome, or Boulogne. Poor 
Philibert! He would have gone to the trenches if he could. 
He was too old. I scarcely saw him, for four years. 


Jane—Our Stranger 319 

When I had leave I spent it with Jinny. He did the 
same, but our leave didn’t often coincide. 

Jinny came back to Paris and lived with her grandmother. 
There was a room kept ready for me in the flat. 

Sometimes I motored down from the front, along the 
thundering roads where armies moved in the dark, and with 
the gigantic rumble of motor convoys, and the pounding of 
the guns in my ears, I would step into the little still bright 
sitting room with its glinting miniatures and silk hangings 
to find the two of them rolling bandages or knitting socks. 

Jinny seemed to me quite safe there. 

And in a way I was glad that the years of her girlhood 
should be passed in a seclusion and quiet that would have 
been impossible in peace time. There was no one left to 
spoil her now, no army of servants for her to order about, 
no pageant of pleasure to dazzle her eyes. The problem of 
her life seemed like everything else to be simplified out of 
recognition. 

I did not know that Bianca had come back to Paris. I 
had forgotten her. Jinny was very sweet to me when I 
came. She would turn on my bath and help me take off my 
things, and wail over my dreadful hands, stained with dis¬ 
infectants and swollen with chilblains. 

“Oh, darling,” she would say, “how brave you are to do it,” 
and then she would shudder and add—“I couldn’t—the sight 
of blood makes me sick. How you can bear the ugliness—” 

And I would assure her that she was much too young to 
do nursing. 

Your mother was very kind to me. The war had aroused 
her from the lassitude of old age. She had risen to meet it. 
Lifting her gentle head proudly, she had seemed to look out 
beyond the confines of her narrow seclusion, across the years, 
and to see her country rise before her in its old beauty, its 
one-time grandeur. 

“France will have her revenge now,” she had said, with 
a flash lighting her weary eyes. 


320 Jane—Our Stranger 

And her mind appeared more vigorous. She read all the 
newspapers or asked Jinny to read them aloud to her. She 
took a great interest in my work, and seemed to regard me 
as some admirable but inexplicable puzzle. 

“You are too brave, mon enfant, and too exalted. When 
the war is over and you come back to your old habits, to 
take up your old life—you will see—” 

“Maybe I shall never come back to it, dear—never take 
up again the old life as you say.” 

And again she smiled, thinking that I was joking, but I 
was not joking, my brain was clear, I believe I knew even 
then, that I would never run Philibert’s house again. 

“You look happy, my child,” she said to me one day. 

“I am belle-mere” 

“Ah—but how curious !” 

“But dear—it is not as if any one very near or dear were 
in danger., Philibert is safe, Blaize too, driving his ambu¬ 
lances.” 

“But the horror, the pain, the suffering all round one—• 
look—already in our family five young men killed—your 
Aunt Marianne bereft of her sons—your Uncle Jacques 
crippled—” 

“I know—I know—I do feel for them, and I do feel for 
France. When I say that I am happy, I only mean, that for 
me the equation of life is so simple, that I am content as 
never before.” 

“I see—you are happy because of the sacrifice you have 
made—because of all you have given up in the cause for 
our country. Cela est trks bean!’ 

“No, dear.” I felt bound to try and explain. “It is 
not that. It is not fine at all. I haven’t given up any¬ 
thing that I cared about. I have only got what I wanted. 
I have found my place, my right place—the place of a 
worker.” 

She looked puzzled, then turned it off with a smile. 

Jinny was growing up and the war was slipping by over 
her little blond head like a monstrous shadow. She seemed 


Jane—Our Stranger 321 

in that greyness, to become unreal. I did not know what 
was going on in her mind. 

One night in March 1918 I staggered in on her. I must 
have been more tired than I realized. My head was burn¬ 
ing. The little soft still room, your mother with her hair 
in stiff regular waves, a lace shawl round her shoulders, and 
Jinny, smiling over a story book; it was like a dream. 

And Jinny was like a little creature in a dream. Her idle 
delicate hands, her plaintive voice were strange. She had 
on a rose coloured frock, and was eating sweets. Some one 
had sent her a box of chocolates. 

“Look, Mummy, chocolates—we never have them any 
more, do we, petite-mere?” 

I had seen the world rushing to destruction; the powers 
of darkness triumphant. Just beyond those walls, along 
the road, one came to the edge of the abyss. 

“Mummy, I hate the war, c’est si bete —when will it end?” 
she pouted. 

Suddenly I was angry; I felt that it was wrong for my 
daughter to be like that, wrong and stupid. 

“Jinny,” I cried—“are you asleep? Don’t you under¬ 
stand that the world is coming to an end ?” 

But she looked at me with curious defiant eyes and asked, 
“What do you mean?” 

“I mean what I say. Come with me tomorrow. Come and 
see. Come and help—you’re no longer a child. Come!” 
But she drew away from me with a shiver. 

“I couldn’t,” she said in a fine hard little voice. 

And your mother broke in, 

“Jane, you must be mad to suggest such a thing.” 

“But I want her to know—to understand—to share—” 

“That is wrong. What is there for her to understand? 
She is a child. Her life is not involved in the war. It lies 
beyond. She should be protected from this nightmare.” 

“I want her with me.” 

Your mother shook her head sadly. “If you want her 
with you, you should stay at home and look after her. You 


322 Jane—Our Stranger 

have been admirable, you have devoted yourself, but when 
the war is over, you will perhaps find that you have made a 
mistake.” 

‘‘Mistake! Would you have me stay at home while men 
are dying by thousands!” 

She sighed gently. “Ah—well—dear—you know best, but 
I wonder sometimes, if you are not deluded—” 

Jinny had disappeared. I found her in her bedroom, 
her head buried in her pillow. 

“I’m a coward,” she sobbed, “a coward. I would be 
afraid to go.” 

I took her in my arms. “My poor little lonely Jinny.” I 
held her a long time—a long time—comforting her, con¬ 
science-smitten, troubled, but the next day I left again for 
the front, following my monstrous illusion, answering the 
terrible call of the greatest imposture in creation. For I 
was wrong and your mother was right. The war was not a 
fine thing. It did not save the world or renew it. It left 
nothing fine or noble behind. It was an obscene monster. 
It called up from the soil of a dozen continents all the fine 
strong men, and devoured them, it summoned out of the 
heart of humanity, heroism, and it devoured that. Courage, 
faith, hope, self-sacrifice, all the dreams of men were poured 
into its jaws and disappeared. Nothing was left but broken 
men, and a ruined earth. 

I ought to have stayed with Jinny. That was my job. 

Her nineteenth birthday was a week after the armistice. 
She had changed from a child to a woman while I was 
away, helping men to die uselessly and suddenly I saw that 
she was wise as I had hoped never to see her. She said to 
me that day, 

“I know Mummy about you and Papa—you needn’t pre¬ 
tend any more.” 

It was time, the family said, that she should be married. 


IX 


W E lived at the Ritz, Philibert and Jinny and I, and 
we were all at sixes and sevens. Philibert’s 
world was in pieces. He would sit by the win¬ 
dow of our hotel salon that gave out on the Place de la 
Concorde, twirling his thumbs and looking at the floor as if 
fie saw the big bright brittle thing that had been his world, 
lying about him in fragments. 

My world! I had glimpsed it during those four years in 
the open; it had nothing to do with this profane ostentation 
of luxury, this coming and going of discreet servants, this 
ordering of meals and of clothes. The war had caught 
me up like a hurricane, had kept me suspended above the 
earth in a region of thunder and lightning, had carried me 
a long distance. Now that I had dropped to earth again, I 
could not get my bearings. The objects about me, the shin¬ 
ing motors, the ermine coats, the jewelled clocks, the rich 
dandies, the smirkings and grimaces looked silly, detestable. 
I had never liked them so very much, now I hated them. I 
remembered the poilus of France who had been my com¬ 
rades, dogged humble grimy heroes, who plodded to death 
across fields of mud in clumsy coats of faded blue that were 
too big for them; I thought of France, their France, a nation 
of men who had humbled me to the dust and had left me 
weeping as a sister weeps who is bereft. I belonged some¬ 
how with them, with those who had died, asking me to send 
their pitiful treasures to their obscure homes, and with 
those who still lived, who would have to begin again now 
the struggle for their daily bread. And I felt akin to 
them in their toil, on the broad brown life-giving earth under 
the open sky. I suffocated in Paris. 

323 


324 Jane—Our Stranger 

And the peace they had fought for became in the hands of 
diplomats and politicians a tawdry thing. Their glib trivial 
lips talked of it as if it were an annoying and exasperating, 
but still a rather amusing puzzle; the peace a million men 
had died for had become the sport of bureaucrats. 

One asked oneself—what was the use?— No use—they 
had given their lives in vain. But these were the men who 
had sent the nations to war. Had this group of well-fed 
clerks and shopkeepers the right to condemn a million inno¬ 
cent men to death? Would they, the men of France, have 
gone, had they known, had they understood? Ah, the pity 
of it,—all the young, all the strong, all the simple folk were 
gone. I heard talk of Alsace-Lorraine of the Rhine Provin¬ 
ces, of Indemnities. Very difficult it seemed to fix the boun¬ 
daries of all the new nations that had come into existence. 
Impossible to get enough money out of Germany to pay for 
the war. 

Reparation! Every one was talking of reparation! But 
how could they hope to repair the irreparable. The war 
had been a gigantic crime against the “people.” Who was re¬ 
sponsible? I wanted to get out of this crowd of jabbering 
diplomats. I wanted to get away and think things out, 
but I couldn’t. Jinny kept me. 

Jinny’s world, where was it? What was it to be? That 
was the immediate question, the pressing problem. She had 
told me that she knew all about Philibert and me. What did 
that mean? How much did she know? I could not tell. 
Her mind was closed to me. 

She eyed us, her parents, strangely. “What,” her eyes 
seemed to ask, “are you going to do about me? You must 
do something. You may be done for, both of you; you 
may have ruined your lives; I’ve a right to live.” 

It was true. We both felt it. Our nerves on edge, we 
saw and with exasperating clearness that we ought to join 
together, try to understand each other for her sake, and set 
about the solution of her future. 

But we were strangers. The war had driven us in opposite 


Jane—Our Stranger 325 

directions. We looked at each other across an immense dis- 
tance. And the fact that Jinny knew we were strangers to 
each other made us feel more strange. It was as if the pre¬ 
tence we had made for her sake had really almost become a 
reality; now that we need no longer keep it up, we felt un¬ 
comfortable without it. And we knew further that there 
was going to be a struggle between us about Jinny and we 
were both afraid to open the subject of her future. And 
we were both afraid, a little, of her. She stood there be¬ 
tween us, lovely, aloof, mysterious, reading us, divining 
our thoughts, judging us. Obscurely we felt this through 
the lethargy that enveloped us. 

Philibert was peevish. He kept asking me how much 
longer the Government would want to keep our house as a 
hospital. When I said I didn’t know, he snarled, scuffled his 
feet and said: “Well, can’t you tell them to take their 
wounded away? I want to get back there. I want to re¬ 
organize my existence. This, living like this makes me 
sick. Who knows what state the pictures are in? Some 
may have been stolen. The Alfred Stevens I’ve reason to 
believe were not properly packed. Everything will be 
damaged. I feel it. I feel it. The Aubusson tapestries 
from the blue salon—Janson you say, saw to them—a good 
firm, but I’m worried, and any way, it will take months to 
get everything back. What a world, what disorder! I de¬ 
test disorder. Look out there at those American soldiers on 
their motor bicycles—riding like mad men—Paris isn’t fit 
to live in. It’s too bad—too bad—what is one to do? All 
these foreign troops swarming about. One can’t call one’s 
soul one’s own.” 

“They helped to win the war.” 

He flung off with a growl. He suspected me of not doing 
what I could to help him get back to his house. He knew 
that had I wanted to I could have got the wounded trans¬ 
ferred at once, but he didn’t want to make the move himself 
at the “Service de Sante ”—for fear that his action might 
seem unbecoming, and he was afraid to ask me point blank 


326 Jane—Our Stranger 

what my idea was. I had no idea—I was waiting for some- 
thing to happen. 

I didn’t have to wait long. It is all so curious, the way 
it worked in together. Bianca’s coming back. Why should 
she have come back ? She was a woman of no character. I 
had frightened her and she had crumpled up and run away. 
But she hated me for humiliating her. She could never for¬ 
give me for having broken up her surface of perfection. 
So under the monstrous cloak of the war she had crawled 
back to get in my way, to trip me up, to do me in, some¬ 
how, and she had stumbled on the way to do it. She had 
come across Jinny. 

And to a woman like Bianca, Jinny must have been like a 
spring in a desert, a thing of a ravishing purity and freshness. 
Like a woman dying of thirst, she flung herself at the child’s 
feet. I see it all now in retrospect. Poisoned, diseased, 
tired to death, addled and excited by drugs, sick of men, un¬ 
utterably bored with herself, here was the one thing to appeal 
to Bianca, the one charm capable of distracting her from 
the nightmare that possessed her. It is the usual tale of 
such women. The cycle is completed. They all end that 
way. And add to her corrupt affection for the child the 
impetus of doing me a final and deadly hurt and you have 
the situation before you. 

By the time I came back from the front, she was suf¬ 
ficiently intimate with Jinny to prevail upon the child, never 
to mention her name to me. I knew nothing. I was un¬ 
aware that they had ever spoken to each other. 

It would have been better if the family had been frank 
with me about their plans for marrying Jinny. It would 
have been better because it would have been kinder, and 
when you want to get round a person it is as well to try 
kindness. Also, it would have been more intelligent. 
Surely they might have understood me, by this time. How 
is it that they did not foresee what would happen? How is 
it that they did not know that if they tried to force my hand 
I would see red? You can persuade a savage to do almost 


Jane—Our Stranger 327 

anything, hut if you frighten him, he smashes things. I 
was the savage. They should have known better how to 
deal with me. 

It was foolish to plot and scheme behind my back and 
plan to put me in the presence of a “fait accompli .” 

I can see, nevertheless, why they did it. They were 
afraid of me. They distrusted me. After twenty years 
among them, I remained for them the “foreigner.” It is 
painful to me now to realize this, but it was so; I had not 
succeeded in becoming one of them. True that during the 
war they had admired my work, but alas, even that service 
now assumed a strange aspect, for the war, it appeared, had 
left me very queer. I had come back with very strange ideas. 
Once when they were all talking of the Russian Revolution 
and the danger of Bolshevism spreading through Europe, 
I had said, 

“Well, what of it?” They had looked at me aghast. 
“But Jane,” some one had cried, “it would be the end of 
civilization”; and I had, perhaps a little abruptly, brought 
out, 

“Surely our civilization hasn’t so much to recommend it.” 

They tried to laugh it off, but they were really very much 
worried. Aunt Clo again sent for me. “I hear you 
have turned socialist and are consorting with strange violent 
men in red ties—” 

“That, dear Aunt, is nonsense. I still see Ludovic if 
you call him violent, and he has, at my request, presented 
to me some socialists. Clementine and I are interested you 
know in the strange ferment of ideas that is the aftermath 
of the war. Frankly I find these people more alive than 
those of my own class, but the socialist deputies don’t really 
appeal to me,” and I added maliciously, “they don’t go far 
enough. Lenin, now, he is consistent, he has an idea—” 

Your Aunt Clo chuckled—“No wonder the family is in 
a fever about you.” 

I was annoyed. “You must tranquillize them. Clem and 
I go to the meetings of the third International, but I’m not 


328 Jane—Our Stranger 

going to do anything you know. It’s only that I find it 
such a bore to go on talking as if the world were or ever 
could be as it was before the war. Let me have any little 
distractions. They’ll do no one any harm. As long as 
Jinny exists, they can feel quite safe. I shan’t throw a 
bomb or take the vow of poverty. Communism doesn’t ap¬ 
peal to me when I think of my child. I want her to be 
safe.” 

At the mention of Jinny your aunt’s face had grown seri¬ 
ous, as serious as such a round expanse of placid flesh could 
grow. 

“Well, what are your ideas for Jinny,” she snapped. 

I was startled. I stammered. “My ideas—?” 

“Yes—you know don’t you, that she’s got to be married?” 

“Ah—but in time. In my country—girls don’t—” 

“This isn’t your country. Jinny is nineteen, she’s very 
conspicuous. There are already several pretendants —” 

“Pretendants?” 

“Yes. Hasn’t Philibert consulted you?” 

“No.” 

“It is as I thought.” 

“What do you mean, Aunt?” 

She pounded on the floor with her cane. She was almost 
impotent now and spent her days in an armchair, from 
which she had to be lifted to bed by two servants. And her 
temper was short. 

“Don’t be a fool! I am warning you. You’d better ask 
Philibert. Don’t tell him I told you. Oh well—do if you 
like, what is it to me, to have him angry?” 

I was very much disturbed but didn’t go to Philibert and 
ask him what he was up to, because I wanted to gain time, 
and it didn’t occur to me as possible that he would really 
commit himself without consulting me. I wanted to gain 
time for Jinny herself. I had hopes for her of what seemed 
to me the happiest of all solutions. 

Philibert thinks to this day that the poor little abortive 
romance of Jinny and Sam Chilbrook was my doing. Poor 


Jane—Our Stranger 329 

sweet babies. I had had no hand in their falling in love. 
It had seemed to me to be the work of God and I had kept 
out of it. 

Sam had come to Paris from the army for the peace con¬ 
ference. He was attached to the President’s suite. I had 
known his father and his mother and his grandfather and 
grandmother. Every one knew the Chilbrooks. They lived 
in Washington and Philadelphia, and the men of the family 
had a taste for the diplomatic service. The grandfather you 
remember was the American Ambassador in London, years 
ago. They were very well off. 

Sam was a romantic, with a humorous grin and the nicest 
voice in the world. He had nice young eyes, and freckles 
on his nose. He liked to do things in a hurry. He met 
Jinny at luncheon at the American Embassy and fell in love 
with her at first sight. 

“Please ask me to tea alone,” he said to me after lunch. 
“I want to talk to you. I want to marry your daughter”— 
and he cocked an eyebrow like a puppy. 

I laughed and said, “But I don’t think you can.” 

“Please ask me to tea anyway and please Madame de 
Joigny don’t laugh at me. Love at first sight is sometimes 
true love, you know.” 

I asked him to tea, and he put us into our car. 

Jinny wrapped in grey furs, her face flushed palest pink, 
her eyes shining, snuggled up to me and took my hand. 

“What a nice lunch party, Mummy.” 

“Did you enjoy it, darling?” 

“Yes. I talked to the American with red hair. He has 
a face like a sky terrier—he was very amusing.” Then with 
a little sigh, “Darling Mummy, I do love you so.” 

When Sam came to tea—he had seen Jinny twice in the 
meantime—he wasted no time. 

“I do seriously and truly want to marry your daughter, 
Madame de Joigny.” 

“But you can’t, she’s a Roman Catholic.” 

“That’s easy. I’ll become one.” 


330 Jane—Our Stranger 

I laughed again. I was beginning to adore him. “I will 
take care of her,” he said, “as you would want me to take 
care of her. She would be safe with me. She would be 
worshipped. I would kneel to her, and I would make her 
happy. She would be happy, I vow to you, she would be 
happy.” 

“I am afraid it is impossible.” 

“Why—?” 

“Her father has other ideas.” 

“Let me go to him.” 

“You may of course, but he will send you packing.” 

He flushed painfully and I saw in his eyes a deep shy 
hurt look, the look of modesty and innocence—and faith. 

“But if she loved me, surely he wouldn’t refuse then—” 

“Perhaps not. I don’t know. He might all the same. It 
would depend on how much she cared.” 

“I will make her care.” 

“But,” I broke off, I hesitated. Why should I have 
been so scrupulous? What obligation had I to warn Phili¬ 
bert that his daughter might fall in love with this eligible 
American? Still I did have a scruple. 

“It is not considered fitting you know, in our French 
world, for a young man to pay court to a jeune fille without 
her parents’ approval.” 

“Then what am I to do?” 

“I don’t know.” 

We sat in silence a moment. 

Suddenly he got up. He stood there before me, tall, clean, 
honest. 

“You’re not against me, Madame de Joigny?” 

“No, I’m not against you.” 

“Well then, I guess I know what to do. I guess I can 
wait. You can trust me, you know. I won’t bother your 
daughter. All the same, we are all in Paris together, and I 
can’t help seeing her sometimes, can I?” His eyes smiled, 
but he was very serious. I realized how serious he was 
when Philibert remarked a few days later that he had met 


Jane— Our Stranger 331 

quite a nice young American lunching at the Jockey Club, 
quite a man of the world, a national polo player, a Mon¬ 
sieur Chilbrook. Did I know him? Yes, I said I knew 
him, and had known his family always. Philibert thought I 
might ask him to dinner with Colonel and Mrs. House, the 
following week. I did so, but Sam made me no sign. He 
was perfectly correct. The only thing that was noticeable 
was his successful effort to interest Philibert. I myself was 
surprised. Poor Sam—little good it did him. 

Jinny seemed happy. She enjoyed being grown up and 
going to parties. In June we gave her a coming out ball, 
for in spite of all my premonitions we had again taken pos¬ 
session of our house. After that I took her to a number of 
dances. She was surrounded by young men of course. 
Sam was only one of a dozen; she treated them all 
with the same radiant aloofness. She made me no 
confidences. Her intimacy with her father was greater than 
ever. Together they had supervised the unpacking and re¬ 
arrangement of the household treasures. Philibert was edu¬ 
cating her. I observed that she had his flair for bibelots. 
She had already all the patter of the amateur collector. 
They went shopping together a good deal. More often than 
not, coming in from some luncheon I would find that they 
had gone out together for the afternoon. 

On one such day, when I was sitting alone, Sam Chilbrook 
was announced. He was troubled. His eyes were dark, 
his young face tired. 

“Jinny loves me, I know she does, Madame de Joigny, but 
she is unhappy. It is time I went to her father. You see 
I’m afraid,” he stammered, “afraid that she won’t have the 
courage—if I don’t—” 

“But have you spoken to her—I thought you promised.” 

“I’ve not spoken—I’ve kept my promise, but I wish you 
hadn’t exacted it. I know your daughter now. I know 
her character, and I love her. She spoke yesterday in a way 
that frightened me—” 

“What did she say?” 


332 Jane—Our Stranger 

“She sard that she loved her father better than any one 
in the world. 

“That was all?” 

“Yes, no—not quite.” 

“What else did she say ?” 

“She said that if it came to a struggle between them, or 
between you and him about her—she was sure she would 
do what he wanted.” 

“Well, then go to him!” He left me at five ; it was that 
same afternoon only a few minutes after he had gone, that 
you, Blaise, were announced. 

I understand now what it cost you to do what you did. 
Tout simplement it cost you the affection of your family. 
You ranged yourself on my side, against them. That was 
what it amounted to. That anyway was the way they took 
it. 

I remember your face when you told me that I had best 
go round to your mother’s flat at once, that Philibert and 
Jinny were there and some other persons whom I ought to 
see. I didn’t at first grasp what you meant. What other 
persons ? The little Prince Damas de Barbagne of the family 
des Deux Ponts and his uncle. 

“In your mother’s drawing-room?” 

“Yes.” 

“With Jinny?” 

“Yes.” 

“But I refused to present him to her only a few months 
ago.” 

“I know.” 

“What then— ?” Suddenly it dawned on me. 

“Philibert!” I almost shouted, “Philibert has done this 
without consulting me. That miserable little creature.” 

You nodded. 

I knew the Damas boy. Philibert and I had stayed with 
his uncle in their dreadful old prison of a place. 

The young man had made on me a very disagreeable im- 


Jane—Our Stranger 333 

pression. His reputation was of the worst, and his appear¬ 
ance did not belie it. He was small and weak legged and 
had no chin. His skin was bad and his eyes yellow. He 
professed in those days a great admiration for the Crown 
Prince of Germany, and I fancy had taken the latter as his 
model. One of the things that amused him was, I found 
out, the torturing of animals. Fan had told me a tale 
about him that I had never forgotten. 

One day he was terribly bored. Not knowing what to 
do with himself he brought all his dogs into the house. 
He had twelve, all kinds, greyhounds, setters, great danes. 
He told his man to keep them in one of the salons, 
while he went into the next one, and loaded his revolver. 
Disgusted with life, he had become disgusted with his dogs. 
He called them one by one. Then as they came through 
the door, shot them dead. He didn’t missed one. He got 
each one between the eyes. 

“Pour parlers” of marriage were going on you told me, 
between Philibert and the august uncle of this heir to a 
bankrupt principality. I saw it all. The house of the Deux 
Ponts was Royal. It was a branch of the Nettleburgs but 
had maintained a strict neutrality during the war. With 
nearly every throne in Europe crumbling into dust, Phili¬ 
bert still wanted a crown for his daughter’s head. In the 
midst of the savage passion of anger that had seized me, 
I could have yelled with laughter. Philibert still believed 
in his ridiculous baubles. He wanted to put his little girl 
on a throne. Well, I would stop him. 

She was mine. She was mine. 

I had borne her out of my body. She belonged to me. I 
remembered the months before she was born, I remem¬ 
bered the child in my womb, stirring—the obscure passion¬ 
ate tenderness welling up in me—the mysterious sense of 
union. I remembered Philibert’s disgust with my de¬ 
formity, his constant absence. He had left me to myself 
during those months. He had left me, of course, to go to 


334 Jane—Our Stranger 

other women. I had brought Jinny into the world alone, 
The pain had been mine, and mine the ecstasy. What had 
Philibert to do with my child ? 

Now they proposed to dispose of her without my consent. 
They proposed to hand her over to a degenerate. Well, 
they wouldn’t, I wouldn’t stop them. 

My entrance created something of a sensation in your 
mother’s drawing-room. They were all there. I had time 
to take them all in, while they stared at me. The august 
uncle who looked like the Emperor Francis Joseph was 
standing in the window with Philibert. Your mother had 
Jinny on one side of her, at the tea table, the Princeling on 
the other. Her face blanched when she saw me. There 
was terror in her eyes, physical terror, what did she think 
I was going to do? 

Philibert was of course the first to recover himself. He 
came forward in his most perfect manner. 

“Chfae amie, I am so glad that after all you were able to 
come. I had explained to his Royal Highness about your 
terrible migraine—” 

I took his cue. The pompous uncle and the pimple-faced 
Damas kissed my hand, first one then the other. I asked 
your mother for a cup of tea, and drank it slowly, conscious 
of Jinny’s eyes on my face. What did they mean, those 
great brown starry eyes ? What was going on in her mind ? 
I hadn’t any idea. 

“I have interrupted you,” I said putting down my teacup. 
“Pray continue your talk.” 

No one spoke. 

“You were perhaps gathered together for a purpose that 
concerns my daughter ? No ?” 

Philibert went crimson; the uncle coughed; I waited; 
your mother rattled the tea things; she looked at Phili¬ 
bert, he looked at her. “Mon enfant” she quavered, 
at last, “His Royal Highness has honoured you with a 
demand for your daughter’s hand in marriage, and as you no 
doubt are aware, your husband,” her voice almost failed 


Jane—Our Stranger 335 

her, but she controlled it, “your husband, my son, is dis¬ 
posed to think that possibly these two young people would 
be very happy together.” 

“Is it to ask their opinion that they have been brought 
here?” I asked quickly. 

The uncle coughed again. The little shrimp at the table 
stammered—“Not at all, not at all. My opinion is very 
well known to Monsieur de Joigny. I should be honoured.” 

I rose to my feet. I knew now just how far matters had 
gone. They had gone very far indeed! I had no choice. 
It was necessary to be quite definite. I faced the older man. 

“There has been a mistake, your Highness, I do not ap¬ 
prove of this marriage.” 

Philibert made a jump towards me—an exclamation. I 
waved him off. 

“I have other ideas for my daughter. You must excuse me 
from explaining what they are. And now I must beg you to 
let me take this child home. Come Genevieve.” For a 
moment she hesitated, her poor little face crimson, her eyes 
filled with tears. I took her hand and drew her with me out 
of the door. 

That night Philibert and I had a terrible scene. I need 
not go into it in detail. I cannot bear to recall it. It seems 
incredible now that we should have behaved as we did. 
Things were said that will rankle for ever, things that 
would have made it impossible, even if it hadn’t been for 
the last ghastly episode of Bianca, for us to go on living 
side by side. I look back with shame to that hour, I must 
have been beside myself. What was goading me on more 
than anything else, was the realization that Jinny was against 
me. She had been shocked by my behaviour. That was how 
it had struck her. She had been horrified and humiliated. 
That was all. I saw it in her eyes. She didn’t care to know 
why I had done what I did. She only hated my having 
done it. She looked at me with fear and almost, I thought, 
with a shiver of repulsion. 

I refused to give Jinny a penny if he married her off with- 


336 Jane—Our Stranger 

out my approval. He informed me that I could not, by 
French law, disinherit her and that he would find a way 
of bringing me to my senses. As for Sam Chilbrook—Phili¬ 
bert dealt with him the next morning, I don’t know what he 
said to him, but the boy never came back. I never saw him 
again. It must have been something pretty horrible. 


X 



iHERE is little more to tell you. You know about 


Jinny’s subsequent marriage and how after all Phili- 


JL bert, if he did not secure Prince Damas, his 
heart’s desire, is still well enough satisfied with the young 
Duke, his son-in-law. Philibert wanted the Duke, sd I 
let him have him. Jinny wanted the house in Paris so I 
gave it to her. The three live there together, quite har¬ 
moniously I am told. And I? I do not pretend that 
Jinny’s husband is a cad. He is no doubt, as nice as most 
young men about town. I merely regret that he does not 
love her nor she him. Doubtless they will get on very 
well once that fact is established between them. 

You see Jinny’s marriage was my supreme failure. I 
have lost her, I can never do anything more for her. She 
will never turn to me in joy—or in trouble. 

She hates me. It was because she came to hate me that 
I gave way. She believed that I killed Bianca. I didn’t, 
but then I might have, I have no way of knowing whether 
or not I would have killed her. 

I am trying to explain to you why I have come back to 
St. Mary’s Plains. You remember Patience Forbes’ will. 
It read—“To my beloved niece Jane Carpenter, now called 
the Marquise de Joigny, I leave the Grey House and all that 
is in it, because some day, she may want some place to 
go.” Well, she was right—I came back because I had no 
other place to go to. I came back but I came too late. 
The people who lived here and who loved me are all dead 
and I cannot somehow, communicate with them as I had 
hoped to. . I do not know what Patience Forbes would say 
of my life, and I shall never know. Her ghost does not 


337 


338 Jane—Our Stranger 

comfort me because I failed her too. I let her die, here 
alone. 

They found her, you know on the floor by her bed, in 
her dressing gown, the candle on the table burned down to 
its socket; she must have been saying her prayers. Her 
Bible was open on the patchwork quilt; her spectacles were 
beside it and three of my letters, some weeks old, also, 
strangely enough, a facsimile (reduced) of the Declara¬ 
tion of Independence, with a pencil note “To send to Jane.” 
You know how it reads: “When in the course of human 
events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the 
political bonds which have connected them with another 
and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate 
and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Na¬ 
ture’s God entitle them ... We hold these truths to be self- 
evident, that all men are created equal, that they are en¬ 
dowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights that 
among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happi¬ 
ness—” 

The last lines I have quoted were underlined. What 
did she mean by them? What did she want them to mean 
for me, lying there, dying, going out on the great journey 
alone from the empty Grey House—dead, alone in the 
house through that long night with the Bible and the Dec¬ 
laration of Independence beside her? 

I do not know what she meant— I only know that I 
left her alone to die. 

And I do not know whether I have come back defeated 
or victorious. In the conduct of life I was defeated. 
Whenever I tried to do right, I did wrong. To the people 
I loved I was a curse. I had a few friends. You remain, 
and Clementine and Ludovic. But I must lose you too, 
now. I feel it my destiny to be alone. I did not under¬ 
stand how to live among men. But there are hours when 
sitting here in this shabby room, I am conscious of a feel¬ 
ing of high stark bitter triumph. At! such times I think 
of my father’s grave over there beyond the horizon, on a 


Jane— Our Stranger 339 

wide prairie under a high sky. A stone. That stone and I 
are linked together. I loved Philibert once, I love Jinny. 
I am alone now, but I shall hold out. I shall not give in. 
My life has been wasted, but I shan’t end it. I shall see 
it through. It stretches behind me, a confused series of 
blunders. I try to understand. It is finished, but I go 
on living. There is nothing left for me to do but wait. 
Maybe if I wait long enough I shall understand what it is 
all for. 

I love France, but I had to come back here, and I know 
that I will stay. It is right for me to be here. It is fit¬ 
ting and just. In some way that I cannot explain the 
equation of my life is satisfied by my coming, and the prob¬ 
lem—I see it as clear, precise and cold as a problem in 
algebra—is solved. 

Here, in St. Mary’s Plains there is nothing for me. The 
big bustling awkward town is full of strangers who have 
no time to interest themselves in a derelict woman who has 
drifted back to them from “foreign parts.” My return 
seems to those who remember me to be a confession of 
failure. They are not interested in failure, so they leave 
me alone. It is as well. I did not come back to talk but 
to think. I did not come back to begin something new, 
but to understand something old and finished. I do not 
need these bright brave ignorant young people. To do 
what I am doing it is necessary to be alone. 

But to go back to my story. Jinny had a shivering fit 
that night, after the scene in your mother’s flat. Her maid 
called me. She lay on her back in bed her teeth chattering, 
her knees drawn up and knocking together. We put hot 
water bottles to her feet and her sides. It was a warm 
night late in June, but she kept whispering that she was 
cold. The doctor when he came said that it was nerves. 
He prescribed bromide and perfect quiet for some time, 
afterwards a change. He told me that she had a hyper¬ 
sensitive nervous organism, and should be protected always 
as much as possible from excitement or emotional strain. 


340 Jane—Our Stranger 

She slept quietly towards morning. Her hair clung to 
her forehead in little damp curls, soft pale golden hair like 
a child’s. Her closed eyelids were swollen above the long 
brown eyelashes. She lay on her side with both hands 
together under her cheek, her lovely young body at rest. 
Beautiful Jinny. 

I sat watching her. The sound of her father’s voice and 
of mine, saying hideous things rang in my ears. 

Beyond the open window, the darkness was turning to 
light. All about were still shuttered houses filled with 
sleeping people, a million sleeping men and women. Their 
dreams and their weariness, and their disappointments 
seemed to be rising like a mist above the hot close houses. 

I had promised Patience Forbes to love Jinny enough— 
enough for what? Enough—for this—to save her this. 

I had failed, and I felt old, so very old, and at the same 
time my heart was full of childish longings and weakness. 
If only some one would come and comfort me. If only 
some one would take my responsibilities from me. I 
wanted help and relief. I thought of you. I knew that 
you, Blaise, would have helped me, but Philibert had 
shut the door in your face that evening and had snarled 
at me horrible things, saying he would never have you in 
the house again. He had accused you and me of a criminal 
affection for each other. I remembered his livid face and 
twitching lips. A feeling of sickness pervaded my body 
and soul. Jinny, asleep, was fragrant as a flower. I was 
contaminated, unclean. 

Suddenly she was there,—Patience Forbes, my Aunt Pa¬ 
tience, standing on the other side of Jinny’s bed. She had 
on her black mackintosh and her bonnet with the strings 
tied in a knot under her chin. But she was not quite as 
I had last seen her. The wisps of hair that straggled down 
under her bonnet were white. There was something ter¬ 
rible and grand about her. She was old, very old. Her 
face was brown and withered. She looked thin, emaciated, 
her eyes sunken. She looked starved. Her clothes were 


Jane—Our Stranger 341 

very shabby, the clothes of a poor woman. She was grand 
and terrible. Her sunken eyes shone with a splendour I 
had never seen before. She was looking down at Jinny— 
I saw her smile an ineffable smile of unutterable beauty, then 
I waited breathlessly, with such longing, with an anguish of 
longing. Surely in a moment she would turn to me, 
gather me into her arms—now—now she was turning-— 

“Mummy—what time is it?” Jinny was sitting up in 
her bed rubbing her eyes, yawning. Sunlight shone through 
the parted curtains. I looked at my watch. 

“Seven o’clock, darling.” 

“I would like some coffee. Is any one about? I’m so 
hungry. Oh dear—” She sank back onto her pillow. “I 
remember now, I remember—why did I wake up?” 

The next day, I received a cable announcing my Aunt 
Patience’s death. Jinny was lying on her “chaise longue” 
eating chocolates. She said—“Poor thing, but she was very 
old, wasn’t she?” 

“Yes, seventy-five years old.” 

“Older than grandmiere!” 

“Yes, several years older—” Jinny was not interested. 

There was no one in Paris who had ever seen Patience 
Forbes. 

Jinny seemed quite well again; only a little languid and 
silent. She spent most of the day on her chaise longue, 
reading, having her nails manicured, having her hair brushed, 
eating sweets, dozing; she was quite affectionate. 

One evening she said, “I think, Mummy, that I would 
like to go into a convent.” She had on, I remember, a 
white satin neglige trimmed with white fox, and emerald 
green brocade slippers. I must have smiled. 

“Don’t smile, Mummy. I’m not joking, I have thought it 
all out. 'll faut se connaitre.’ I am weak, I have a weak 
character. I liked Sam Chilbrook, but I didn’t dare say 
so. I disliked the Prince very much, I didn’t dare say so. 
If you and Papa could agree, I would be content to do what 
you decided for me—but you can’t agree. No, no, don’t 


342 Jane—Our Stranger 

be tragic. Don’t be so sorry. Let us be reasonable. If 
you never agree on a husband for me, I must either choose 
one for myself and run off with him and be married, or 
become an old maid. Neither seems a very nice idea, does 
it—but to be a nun—that is beautiful. You remember when 
I was little and tried to lead the saintly life—you thought 
it ridiculous. You did not understand. There is something 
in me that you do not take seriously because I am lazy 
and like pretty things and marrons glaces. But it is there 
all the same. If you were a true Catholic I could explain. 
To be a nun is beautiful—beautiful, and I would be safe 
there, and out of the way. For you and Papa there would 
be no more problem, you would not have to live together 
any more. And the sisters love me; they would be glad to 
receive me. They are so gentle, so sweet—you have no 
idea, and quite happy you know. Sometimes they laugh 
and make little jokes, like children. It is much happier in 
the convent than here.” 

It was I that broke down then, and cried. I cried 
miserably, ugly tears, sobbing against Jinny’s languid 
knees. I, a middle-aged woman, disfigured, with a swollen 
face, a great, strong, tired, drab creature, in whose tough 
body life had gone stale, was humbled before my beautiful 
child. 

I asked her forgiveness. Brokenly I begged her to be 
kind. And I apologized to her. Kneeling beside her I 
tried to explain my inability to believe in any creed, any 
dogma of the Church, I spoke of truth, I proclaimed as if 
before a high spiritual judge, my honest search for truth. 
Pitiful? Yes—but do you not believe that it is often so— 
mothers kneeling to their children, avowing their mistakes, 
their failures, begging for love? 

I was desperate to destroy the thing that separated us— 
I was so lonely so alone—it seemed to me that this moment 
held my one chance, my one hope of drawing my child 
close to me. I looked up at her. Cool, lovely youth hold¬ 
ing aloof, if only she would come, if only she would re- 


Jane—Our Stranger 343 

spond and take me in her slim fresh innocent arms. Ah, 
the relief it would be—the comfort! 

“Jinny—Jinny—love me—I need your love, I am your 
mother. I am growing old. There is no one left for me 
to turn to—no one to advise me, no one to care for me, 
except you. Do you realize what I mean? My life is 
finished, it goes on only in you, only for you. Jinny, 
Jinny, don’t you understand, I need you.” 

She stroked my hair lightly with delicate fingers, but 
looking up, I saw that her face was contracted in a nervous 
spasm—of distaste. A moment longer I waited staring up 
at her face with a longing that must have communicated 
itself to her, a longing so intense that I felt it going out 
of me in waves but she made no sign. 

“I do love you, Mummy—you know I do,” she said in a 
dull little voice. 

I stumbled to my feet and left the room. 

Philibert had gone away, so when the doctor 
said a few days later that Jinny should go to Biarritz it 
was I who took her, though I knew she would rather have 
gone with some one else. I should have sent her with a 
companion. Plad I left her alone then things might 
have been mended, but I was too jealous, and though I 
knew the truth in my heart I couldn’t bear to admit that 
my child didn’t like being with me. I kept on thinking of 
ways to win back her love, silly feeble ways. I was like 
a despairing and foolish lover who cannot bring himself to 
leave the object of his passion though he knows that every¬ 
thing he does exasperates her. I had no pride. I gave her 
presents. I did errands for her that the servants should 
have done. With a great lump of burning pain in my 
heart I went on smiling and busy, avoiding her eyes and 
fussing about her, and she was exquisitely patient and po¬ 
lite. 

I do not know to this day whether Bianca followed us 
to Biarritz knowingly and with intent, or not. Clementine 


344 Jane—Our Stranger 

told me afterwards that she had seen Bianca with Philibert 
at Fontainebleau at the Hotel de France on the Sunday, the 
day he left Jinny and me, after our scene, but whether 
she learned from Philibert during the week they spent to¬ 
gether of Jinny’s whereabouts and tracked her down, I 
cannot tell. Probably not. Yet it may be. . . . It is all 
so strange that one can believe anything. Philibert and 
Bianca together—after all those years—that in itself is 
extraordinary. What sort of relationship could have ex¬ 
isted between them at the end? I don’t know. I do not 
attempt to understand. They were people beyond my com¬ 
prehension, but some thing that they possessed in common, 
some bond, some feeling profound and complex, had evi¬ 
dently survived. 

It is useless dwelling upon their problem. Revolting? 
Evil? I suppose so, and yet their infernal passion has 
somehow imposed upon me a dread respect. Philibert after 
Bianca’s death crumpled up as if by magic into a silly little 
old man. I saw it happen to him, there in that hotel where 
he came rushing on receipt of the news. He stood in my 
room shaking and disintegrating visibly before my eyes, 
profoundly unpleasant, pitiful. It was as if Bianca had 
held in her hand the vital stuff of his life, and as if with 
her death he was emptied of all energy and power. 

All this happened you see at Biarritz where Bianca came 
and found us. 

I am almost sure that I did not think of killing Bianca, 
even at the very end, when I found myself in her room, 
standing over her. And yet, if she hadn’t taken that over¬ 
dose of morphine herself, that very night, what would have 
happened I don’t know. 

It is very curious, her dying like that, whether by ac¬ 
cident or intent, no one will ever know, on just that night, 
and in just that place, involving me in Jinny’s eyes, for 
ever. God knows there were plenty of other places on the 
earth where she might more logically have chosen to breathe 
her last. Why not in Venice in that great dark vaulted 


Jane— Our Stranger 345 

palace of hers with the black water lapping under her bal¬ 
cony? Or in her castle in Provence, where she lived with 
her demons, or in Paris in the red lacquer den with its 
golden cushions? Any one of those settings would have 
been more in keeping—but in the Plage Hotel—above the 
sea, no, there was no poetic justice in her choosing that 
spot. And if it was an accident, then the freakish spirit 
who planned it did it with his diabolical eye on Jinny and 
me. 

We had been a week in Biarritz. Jinny had found some 
young people with whom she played tennis in the after¬ 
noon. Occasionally I left her for a game of golf. One day 
coming back I saw her sitting on the terrace with a woman 
whose eccentric elegance was familiar, but whom I did 
not at first recognize. I saw her back, long and narrow, 
a fur wrap slipping from the shoulders, an attenuated arm 
hanging across the back of her chair. Jinny, all in white, 
her hair a golden halo in the light of the sun that was set¬ 
ting behind her, was facing her. Their faces were close 
together. The older woman was leaning forward. She 
had Jinny’s hand in both of hers. There was about this 
pose something intimate and intense. Jinny started up 
at the sight of me, and the woman turned her small dark 
head round and gave me a little nod. It was Bianca. 

She was very much changed. I remember every detail 
of her appearance, her red turban, her soiled white 
gown, her fur coat that looked somehow rather shabby. 
She was carelessly dressed, she had an air both tawdry 
and neglected. Actually she didn’t look clean. Her face 
was startling. The makeup was badly done. Once it had 
been a smooth even white, now the eyelids were yellow and 
on the thin cheek-bones were spots of red. The finger nails 
of the beautiful hand that hung limp over the back of her 
chair were enamelled pink but dirty. She had obviously 
been going down hill at a rapid pace, and for one instant 
this realization in the midst of my panic at finding her 
with Jinny, gave me pleasure. For Bianca to turn into 


346 Jane—Our Stranger 

an untidy hag; that was something to make me wickedly 
exultant. 

She looked at me calmly out of *her monstrous eyes. “It 
is centuries since we met,” she said. I did not reply. I 
was trembling and I saw that she saw my trembling. Her 
discoloured eyelids lifted, and sent out their old fiery blue 
light. Her eyes grew more enormous. She stared into 
mine and her thin pointed lips curved into a smile. “Not 
since Deauville, after the death of poor Fan Ivanoff—four, 
five, six years—is it not? Before the war. I have been 
so little in Paris.” Her eyelids fluttered, her eyes dead¬ 
ened, a curious lassitude spread over her suddenly. She 
drooped, in her chair, she was like a bruised soiled faded 
plant, almost to me she seemed to exhale the odour of de¬ 
cay. “I have travelled—I have wandered—Spain—Portu¬ 
gal—America—Buenos Aires—I am so restless, I go any¬ 
where—” her voice trailed off. She gave herself a little 
jerk. Her eyes slid to Jinny, dwelt upon her. “Your 
daughter and I have been talking. ‘Quel amour d’enfant’ 
—so exaltee, so sensitive.” 

Jinny, it seemed to me, was rather pale. She stood 
nervously clasping her hands, her eyes moving from one of 
us to the other. 

“The Princess brought me a message from Papa,” she 
said in a shrill defiant note. 

“Ah yes, I saw him just the other day—v/here was it? 
I cannot remember, I have no memory, but he told me you 
were here.” 

The long unclean hand again went out to Jinny. It 
caressed her arm. I shivered. “Don’t,” I muttered in 
spite of myself. 

Bianca jerked, a nervous twitch, and gave a little laugh. 

“Ah, you see, my child, your mother doesn’t like—” 
She broke off. Jinny’s face was crimson now. “Never 
mind—she is perhaps right. I will leave you now. I go 
to the Casino. It is all so boring. Perhaps later—” 

She did not look back at us as she trailed away. I thought 


Jane—Our Stranger 347 

to see toads jumping up from the imprint of her feet. 

Upstairs, I said as quietly as I could: 

“How is it that you know the Princess?” 

“Papa introduced me to her long ago—when I was quite 
a little girl.” 

“You have seen her since?” 

“Yes.” 

“Often?” 

“Several times.” 

“You admire her?” 

“Yes—she is strange. I like strange things.” 

“I do not like her at all,” I said curtly. 

Jinny sat on the edge of a table, poking into a box of 
chocolates. 

“Why don’t you like her, Mummy?” 

“Because she is a bad woman.” 

“Oh no, surely you are wrong. She is Papa’s oldest 
friend.” She popped a sweet into her mouth. 

“Who told you that?” 

“She did herself—and besides, I know—I have known a 
long time. She was his first romance, his—what do you call 
it,—his calf love.” 

I burst into harsh laughter. My laugh sounded to me 
ugly and terrible. Jinny’s face went pale; I crossed to 
the window. 

“What else did she tell you?” I asked with my back to 
her. 

“She has told me about life in convents, she is very de¬ 
vout. She has often been in convents to ‘faire une retraite* 
She says it is very soothing there, but that I should not 
be in a hurry about making a decision.” 

“Ah!” 

“Yes—she seems to understand me—she conveys much 
sympathy. She has a magnetism—it draws one.” 

“I know.” 

“What is the matter, Mummy? You are angry. I feel 
sorry for the Princess, she is so alone in the world, and 


348 Jane—Our Stranger 

she says she loves me, that she is wonderfully attracted to 
me, that I would do her good. She called herself laughing 
you know, but with a sadness—she called herself *une 
damnee? ” 

I could contain myself no longer. “Une damnee —well, 
that’s just what she is—.” I wheeled about. I felt my 
voice rising in spite of me. “I forbid you ever to speak to 
her again. Do you understand? You must never speak 
to her again.” My child’s face hardened. The eyes wid¬ 
ened, the nostrils dilated. She was very pale. Some¬ 
thing sinister seemed to rise between us. She receded from 
me. 

“Don’t—don’t!” she whispered backing away. 

“Don’t—don’t what?” I cried back. “You don’t want me 
to stand between you and this horrible woman who has 
ruined my life—ruined your father—ruined us all—and who 
wants now to ruin you.” 

“No, no, no—don’t say such things.” She was scream¬ 
ing too now. “It is wicked of you to say such things. I 

don’t believe it. I don’t believe you. I won’t believe it. I 

love Papa, I love Papa better than you, better than you. 

You have done it. You have ruined his life. I know it, I 

have seen it. I have seen you look at him with hatred. 
How do you think it feels to see one’s parents hating each 
other? Ruined? Yes, you have ruined my life. You— 
you—you ought never to have brought me into the world. 
I wish I were dead—I wish I were dead—” She rushed 
into her room and banged the door. 

I told myself looking out over that horrible sea, im¬ 
mense, restless and cold, that nothing irretrievable had hap¬ 
pened, that Jinny would come back to me, that she would 
forgive, that things would be the same. But I had no 
faith, and what did that mean, if things were the same. 
Was that sufficient as a basis for the future? What if we 
went on and on having scenes—screaming at each other. 
I was ashamed, and shaken, and I was afraid. Bianca had 
come back—Bianca was there, down the corridor—close to 


Jane—Our Stranger 349 

us, close to Jinny. “Une damnee”? she called herself. 

I must take Jinny away in the morning, but what good 
would that do in the end? Bianca would follow us sooner 
or later to Paris. Jinny would be sure to see her. I had 
a ridiculous picture of Bianca pursuing us from place to 
place, lying in wait for Jinny—laying infernal schemes. I 
remembered what I had recently heard of her strange habits, 
her vicious tastes, of the effect she had had on certain 
women. I saw her, a restless, haunted damned soul, the 
slave of infernal passions, a prowl in the world, hunting for 
victims, growing more implacable as she grew old. 

I dressed for dinner. Jinny sent word she would dine in 
bed. On the way to the lift, I saw Bianca go into her 
room. She looked back at me over her shoulder, half smil¬ 
ing but with a curious look in her eyes. Was it fear? Was 
it regret ? I thought for a long time of that look, I thought 
of it all evening sitting in my high window, listening to 
the interminable boom of the waves. Her presence, near, 
under the same roof was intolerable, like a dreadful smell, 
or an excruciating nagging sound. I was feeling again, 
even now, through my terror for Jinny, and in spite of 
my sickened sense of the woman’s decay, the impact of her 
personality. She existed there beyond my door, special, 
vivid, intense, and I began to feel her decrepitude as a re¬ 
proach, her ruin as a responsibility. Moment by moment 
I felt her, exerting on me a horrible pressure. There had 
been in her dreary face, an appeal, a claim, a despair that 
laid on me a weight. In her eyes, there had been, memory. 
It was that that haunted me. Somehow, actually, her eyes 
had reflected the past and had dragged my mind back, afar 
back to the days when we had been friends. I remem¬ 
bered everything. In their deep burning blue light that 
was like a lamp lighted inside a corpse, I saw her youth 
and my youth glowing, and I remembered how we had 
been together, two strong young things, curiously linked, 
responding to each other, with a sympathy that should have 
been a good thing to us. She had said once, “Jane,’ I 


350 Jane—Our Stranger 

love you—you are the only friend I have ever had.” And 
I remembered the day she had talked to me of herself in 
that old castle in Provence, above the white road and dusty 
vineyard. 

I felt sick and was aware of an intolerable physical pain 
in my side. Bianca, who had been so beautiful, and whom 
I had loved divinely once, was a rotten rag now, soiled, 
dingy, bad smelling—and I hated her. We hated each 
other. Our youth was gone—and all its beauty. There 
was nothing under the sun but ugliness and hatred and the 
principle of life was decay. 

I walked the room. Jinny was asleep—lovely youth— 
fresh and sweet. What would become of her? Bianca and 
I were two old women, done for. 

To protect Jinny from her, Jinny who hated me, that 
was all I could do now. I must go to Bianca. Either 
she would respond to me and give in to me because of the 
memory that had stared out of her face, or I would make 
her; I would force her to do what I wanted as I had 
done before, but this was to be the last time—this must be 
the end. 

I looked in at Jinny. She seemed to be asleep. Out in 
the corridor some one had turned the light low. The long 
red carpet of the corridor led straight to Bianca’s room. 
I went out quickly closing the door after me. It took an 
instant to reach the door of Bianca’s sitting room. I 
knocked. There was no answer. I opened it and went in. 
To the right another door was open, a light shone through. 
Bianca was in bed. I could see her. Her eyes were closed. 
The lamp beside her bed shone on her face, a peculiar odour 
pervaded the room. “I will wake her and have it out with 
her,” I thought to myself. 

I went into the bedroom. A number of bottles, a small 
aluminum saucepan and a hypodermic syringe were on 
the night table beside her. She was breathing heavily 
and noisily, drawing quick, regular, snoring breaths. It 
was obvious that she was drugged; the noise of her breath- 


Jane—Our Stranger 351 

ing was very ugly. Her face was sharp and pinched and 
evil. An extraordinary disorder prevailed in the room. I 
remember now being astonished by it. Untidy heaps of 
underwear about, not very clean, dragged lacey things 
on the floor, a high-heeled slipper on the centre table, a 
litter on the toilet table that reminded one of an actress’s 
dressing room, a tray with a champagne bottle and a plate 
of oyster shells on the end of the chaise longue. And 
pervading every thing that horrid odour of drugs and the 
sound of snoring. 

I stood for a moment looking down at the woman in the 
bed. The sight of her filled me with loathing. How un¬ 
clean she was! She was like a corpse. Already she was 
half dead. She was something no longer human, scarcely 
alive. Her sleep had the quality of a disease, her breath 
was poisonous. 

Suddenly I felt some one beside me. It was Jinny, 
wrapped in her dressing gown. White as a sheet, she stood 
staring down at that dreadful face. “I heard you open the 
door,” she whispered, “I followed you. What is it? What 
is the matter?” 

“Nothing,” I murmured. “She is drugged, that is all.” 
I pointed to the bottle of ether, the syringe in its little 
box. “Come,” I repeated nervously, “come away.” It was 
horrible to have Jinny in that room. 

“But, Mummy, can’t we do something, oughtn’t we to 
do something?” 

“No—come—it’s nothing—I mean she’s used to it.” I 
dragged Jinny away. 

The next morning, the people in the hotel were informed 
that the Princess was dead. She had died in the night of 
an overdose of morphine. 

It was Marie, Jinny’s maid, who burst in on her with the 
news, while she was having her cafe au lait in bed. I 
heard Jinny give a shriek and ran in to her—she had fainted. 

Isn’t it strange the way it all happened? One would 
think that God had a hand in it, but if there is a God, why 


352 Jane—Our Stranger 

should He want my child to believe that I had committed a 
murder? It is that that I do not understand.” 

Jane’s narrative was ended with those words. She had 
talked that last night of my visit to her in St. Mary’s Plains, 
until nearly morning. Her forehead grew damp as she 
talked and her lips dry and her words carried along the 
sustained note of her voice like little frightened sounds. 

And during all those hours that she talked, I remember 
hearing no other sound. I heard no voice in the street, nor 
the sound of trams going by nor of dogs barking. In our 
concentration we were as cut off from contact with the liv¬ 
ing world as if the whole city of St. Mary’s Plains had 
been turned to stone. 

That was just a year ago today. I suppose she is still 
there in that meagre faded room, I can see her there, sit¬ 
ting in the high wooden chair that belonged once upon a 
time to Patience Forbes. The wind is hurrying across the 
immense prairies of her awful wide empty country. It 
rattles the windows of that frail wooden house. She is 
alone there. 

Last night we talked of Jane in Ludovic’s rooms. Clem¬ 
entine was there and Felix, we had been to Cocteau’s ballet. 
Jane would have enjoyed it, they said; she would have 
understood the joke, and perceived the beauty. 

Clementine moved restlessly about. “What is she do¬ 
ing now, I wonder? Surely she is doing something—” 

“She is thinking things out.” 

“Good God!” groaned Felix. “Our Jane—our great 
haughty creature—she wasn’t meant to think. She was 
meant to be looked at—she ought never to have had an 
idea in her head. What a waste—what a wicked waste.” 

Clementine on a footstool by the fire nursed her knees. 
“She Jd really think we were immoral. We took life as 
a joke. She couldn’t understand. She believed in thje 
Bible—-all the part about being wicked. She didn’t know it, 


Jane—Our Stranger 353 

but her creed was the ten commandments. She is a victim 
of the ten commandments.” 

Ludovic shook his head. “She was right,” he said, “all 
her life she wanted to do right—now she has done it. She 
has gone back to her people. She should never have come 
here. There was nothing for her here, but ourselves.” 

“And were we nothing?” cried Clementine, “didn’t we 
love her well? Didn’t we understand?” 

“No, we didn’t understand. And we didn’t count. We 
didn’t count for her.” 

Ah, Jane, Jane, it was true. We didn’t count. In all 
your story, you scarcely alluded to us. We were just your 
friends who loved you, and we didn’t count. If only you 
could know what we know about yourself; if only you 
knew how we cared for you beyond all the differences of 
conduct; if only you could have realized that life is not a 
thing to fear, that it is a little trivial thing, or again, just 
a thing like food, an element like air, to be eaten, or breathed 
or enjoyed. But you thought it a mysterious gift, a ter¬ 
rible responsibility, a high and serious obligation, with a 
claim on your soul. You thought it a thing you could sin 
against. You confounded life with God. 

This little street is so quiet tonight, so quiet and small. 
It shuts me in. It shuts me comfortably in, but beyond it 
there is a great distance—a great land—a great sea—a high 
and terrible sky. 


THE END 



























































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